Way to tell reason for restart/reboot?

Is there a way under XP Home Edition to show the reason for the last reboot?

I leave my PC on all the time, and occassionally come home to find it has been either restarted or rebooted. I'd like to find out why.

Well if MS was still publishing updates for XP I would have said it probably is the updating, that is if XP updates automatically like Vista does.

Is there a bootlog txt file on the root of C? Maybe that might have some info.



Cheers!!!!

You can check under your security logs, it would normally show if a error occured, though it might not exactly say what kind of error.

90% of the time automatic reboots are becuase of software malfunction and it will shut down your pc, other cases are your power settings are set to switch off after a certain period of time.

Or your HDD could be faulty.

Seems like there is some sort of log. I just don't remember the exact location of it off hand.

Reboots can be be caused by a number of things.

Sometimes a failing power supply can cause it.

As already stated the hard drive can be going bad, as well as there being a possible software issue.

Other failing hardware can cause it as well.

To help rule out software you could download one of the live Linux distributions like Knoppix and leave it running and see if your computer reboots. If it reboots, this could point to hardware. If it doesn't reboot you could be looking at software problems. You could scan and update your software, to see if that helps.

Then you could run some diagnostics on your hard drive to check for problems, if you think it's hardware.

The two main things that I have seen fail on computers, hardware-wise, is the hard drive or the power supply. The motherboard doesn't fail that often from my experience.

Or, maybe you are having electrical problems in your house or your area? The flashing digital clocks can be a sign of this, and of course things like lost time.

Troy


[edit on 17-12-2008 by cybertroy]

You can right-click "My computer", choose "Manage" and then, when the Computer Management console appears, choose "System tools", "Event viewer" and finaly "System".

Any unexpected reboot will be logged in the "System" log, something with a description like "The previous shutdown was unexpected".