Computer shuts down when using...

azdood

Hello - Every once in awhile, not often, I'll be running the deep scan with RegSupremePro and my computer will shut down - the monitor turns black and the power goes off. If I run the scan again after turning my computer back on, it works fine but I worry that damage might have been done and, of course, wonder why this happened in the first place. Please help. Thanks.

jv16

Do you have the automatic reboot feature enabled in your system? In other words, does it automatically reboot instead of showing the blue screen of death?

I have heard a few similar reports in the past. After some research the problem has always been traced to some hardware problem, such as insufficient power supply. The reason why the problems occur when running jv16 PowerTools or RegSupreme's registry scan must be that it uses so much of the computer's power.

azdood

I'm not sure I have the reboot thing enabled. Where would I look for that? I don't get the blue screen of death, my computer shuts down completely leaving me to watch a black screen and reboot manually.

I'm no computer expert, but I had as much memory installed on my computer as it could take because I had problems with it before. I've never had any problems with power since, so I don't think - but I'm not 100% sure either - that is the problem. Any other ideas? Thanks. Much appreciated.

jv16

To check whether you have the automatic reboot setting enabled in Windows XP do the following.

Open Control Panel, go to System, click "Advanced" tab and from there the Settings button under "Startup and Recovery".

Under the box "System failure" there is a check box called "Automatically restart". If you have it enabled, try to disable it. This way the computer shows you an error message (the blue screen of death) in a case of total system crash instead of just rebooting the computer.

azdood

Thanks. I'll follow your instructions.

Another question if I may. Am I harming my computer by running RegSupremePro every night? A friend told me it would wear down my hard drive. I'd never heard that before. I use your program, run System Mechanic and do a quick defrag with Diskeeper Lite every night before I turn off the computer. I thought I was doing the right thing. What's you opinion? And thanks again.

jv16

Well, of course, in theory everything you do wears down the moving parts inside your computer, mainly the hard drives.

As far as I know, this was actually a problem a long time ago (computers of the late 80s or the early 90s or so) but the hard drives of modern computers are so well built they don't break down any longer for this reason.

So my opinion is that there is nothing you can do with your computer that could damage the hardware in it. It's pretty much impossible to do any kind of physical damage to a computer using only software. But do notice that I'm a software person, my knowledge computer hardware might not be perfect.