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Laptop keeps restarting


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#1
laundre

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Hello,

My fiancee has a Dell Inspiron 1525 that came loaded with Windows Vista (32 bit I believe). It's about 3 years old and a few months ago she noticed that it would restart on its own maybe once a week. Since then it's slowly increased in frequency to the point where today she was unable to type a sentence in MS Word without it restarting before she finished.

We booted it in safe mode though and it was fine (at least for the few hours we had it in safe mode)

We've scanned it with the McAfee antivirus software that it came with, with Trend Micro Housecall, Adaware, and Spybot and nothing came up.
We tried running with the wireless card off and also with the battery removed to try to eliminate some hardware possibilities.

I checked as many error logs as I could locate in Vista none of which provided a reason or code that could be researched beyond saying there was an unexpected restart.

Would be grateful for any light you can help shed on this situation as she needs her laptop to finish writing her thesis!

We have it running in normal mode right now as I type and its working but it will undoubtedly restart within a few minutes. It's very unpredicatable!

Thanks!
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#2
Guest_bartblaze_*

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Hi,

have you read the following post : http://www.geekstogo...uide-t2852.html ?



Good luck :) .
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#3
laundre

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Yes I saw that but I wasn't sure that it was a malware problem and my fiancee wasn't comfortable with me downloading a bunch of programs on her work computer. She thought I might mess it up further.

I wanted to update this though because she wound up having to turn it over to her lab's IT dept and since she couldn't wait weeks to get it back she decided to buy a laptop for her personal use (she would need one in the coming months anyway). So we don't have an answer for this and based on the past track record we're doubtful that the IT dept will find an answer but in case they do, I'll update this in case anyone else stumbles upon this post.
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#4
rshaffer61

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We booted it in safe mode though and it was fine (at least for the few hours we had it in safe mode)

The hint is here. If it works in safe mode then the culprit could be drivers, startups or autoruns.

Try this and see what happens.
Lets see what you have in your startup

Please click on
Start and then to Run
Type in msconfig and press Enter
Now click on Startups
Then uncheck everything and restart.
If system boots correctly and is running smoothly and faster then we have a startup problem
Try going back into msconfig and check one item and reboot
Keep doing that till you have found the problem or all are finally checked.
Post back with the results
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#5
laundre

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Thanks for the help but since the laptop is no longer in our possession we're probably not going to be able to solve this one.

After it ran fine in safe mode it returned to being relatively usable in regular mode. It still would restart maybe twice a day. So it's tough to say whether it was really any different in safe mode because we only had it there for a few hours and we weren't using it actively.

Thanks for replying though. No one else needs to waste time in replying since I can't do anything with the advice at this point no matter how great it is.
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#6
rshaffer61

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Not a problem and if by chance it does come back to you then just let us know and we can continue. Thank you for letting us know.
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