Hey guys,

My grandmother's computer keeps rebooting itself. My dad and I can not figure out what the heck is wrong with it. When he told me what it was doing my first thought was the Sasser virus. So we went and looked it up on the Microsoft updates page. My dad finally gave up, formated the drive, and tried re-installing windows 2000 pro. This was a task within itself. He tried several times to install it and it would stop at random times saying errors that it cannot copy. It finally got to 85% and he gave up. He thought maybe there was something wrong with the disk but it can't be because I just installed it on my computer to make sure the disk was working properly and it installed without a hitch. The machine would also not read a burnt CD-Rom with F-prot on it to scan and see if it had a virus. The machine would reboot totaly randomly. If I pressed Alt+Ctl+Del and brought up the task manager and that bought me a few minutes. I am leaning towards thinking the hard drive may have issues with it. The machine was built about a year and a half ago. The hard drive was bought the same time the machine was built. I have no clue what make, model etc. about it as My dad built it and I did not.

This is what I know:
PIII 450mhz
40gig hard drive
393 megs of PC100
58x cd-rom

I too had problems installing win2k, it was on an even older HD of 10 GB's. Errors all the time.. I forgot to defrag and it took 8 hours, Win2k still worked however and it still runs today. I don't know why the burned CD didn't work however.. maybe it failed?

My dad finally figured out that it was a bad stick of ram after hours of getting frustrated by the machine. I have never seen a stick of ram do this. He unpluged the cd-rom, slave drive (old 300 something meg hard drive for a quickbooks back up file?) and the ram. It worked after that and then he stuck the ram in the machine again and it kept rebooting. We stuck it in another computer that we know worked and it just kept on rebooting. So I guess my thaught was wrong about a bad hard drive. Never had ram do that before but I guess anything is possible.

that happened to me before, except, it wasn't rebooting. the installation just stalls and tells you to redo the whole process again...