Windows XP Restarting

I have a problem on my pc that is baffling me. I have XP Pro on a AMD 1600/3D Prophet II 32 MB/Soundblaster live 5.1...don't remember the brand that my board is. The computer is continually restarting! Last night I was doing a backup to CD and 3/4 way through, the pc restarts. When I go into games, the game will play for a certain amount of time, then restart the computer. The game plays anywhere from 2 minutes to 30 minutes before it restarts the $&^*($ computer. I just finished rebuilding it last night thinking that would solve it. Wrong! Any ideas? I need help! I suspect that the problem lies with my crappy video card or the soundcard. Any help you can provide is greatly appriciated.

It sounds more like the Blaster worm virus. Go to WWW.Symantec.com and run the online virus check. You can also get the removal tool there. Good luck!

I checked for viruses last night. None. Aplied service pack 1a, along with new video and soundcard drivers. Still acting wierd though. Any other ideas?

This could be a number of things, so lets examine the possibilities and some possible solutions.

1. Bad drivers for graphics card ! Try the latest from supplier
2. Faulty memory ! If two modules take 1 out and try system. If no luck try swapping
3. Faulty power supply ! Try one with a bigger wattage
4. Over heating ! Make sure all fans are running on motherboard. Also check heat of processor in the bios
5. Faulty device driver ! Check control panel/system/device manager for errors. Then update any that are faulty
6. Any hardware device ! Pull out all hardware that is not necessary ie modem and run sytem for a while to see if it is ok.
7. Faulty Motherboard or proceesor ! If all else fails replace.

Hope this helps M8

Try using safe mode and se if you get the same problem if the machine is stable then i would think you have a driver problem, check device manager for bad entries

Make sure you haven't picked up the Masterblast virus. One of the symptoms is the pc re starting on it's own

Did you use the all system crack on your pc to install XP Pro with out having to activate it I know that it can cause the system to spontaniously reboot itself too but it doesnt seem to work with service pack 1 If you did use it try putting the original winlogon.exe file back in place it will say you have to active but if it doesnt reboot then you know whats up. I tried using it when i upgraded my pc because i didnt want to go through the pain of calling Microsoft to re activate my system after the upgrade and i couldnt do it again online because the differant cpuid kept it from going through. I finaly had to spend an hour on the phone waiting on hold to reactivate.