BleepingComputer.com: Windows Vista Restarts Unexpectedly

Greetings everyone, and I was hoping I may get some ideas on how to fix this issue that I have been having.

I have a Toshiba Satellite M45-S269 laptop and am running Vista Home Premium. About a month and a half ago I installed SP1 which began the havoc on my computer. I spoke to MS tech support and we decided to reformat (bah) the computer, which I did, and reinstall Vista.

That's where the restart problem came in. As far as I can tell, every driver is up to date, but when I run in Normal mode, I may get an hour or a day before the computer suddenly decides to restart itself. No error messages given, no BSOD. I have the settings to where there is no automatic restart upon receiving the BSOD message, but still nothing.

In safe mode, it can run for days and days without any issue, but then I am at the lowest video display, and no sound.

I've run the requisite programs to check for errors (AntiVir, AdAware, CCleaner, ScanDisk, the built in Memory Scan) and to no avail I cannot find the problem. I checked all my drivers and unless there is a leaky driver that I'm not catching I am at a loss.

Has anyone had this issue before or any suggestions as I may go about fixing the problem?

*staff - my apologies if there is already a thread started on this issue, I did search around before posting my problem.*

I have an M45 and they don't play well with Vista. That being said, you can get it to work but you'll be severely limited in what you can do (the primary limiter is the onboard graphics). Mine was used to beta test Vista back in June of 2006 during a trip to Microsoft and it then had a copy of the release version of Ultimate.

Because of this, the drivers are problematic to say the least. Ensure that you have the updated chipset/motherboard drivers for Vista, and then ensure that you get the updated Vista drivers for the video card. Don't attempt to use XP drivers under any circumstances.

Check your Device Manager to ensure that there's no problems with other drivers (go to Start and type in "devmgmt.msc" (without the quotes) and press Enter).

Go to Start...Control Panel (Classic View)...System...Advanced System Settings...Performance Settings button...Visual Effects tab...and set the system to "Adjust for best performance". Disable the Aero theme (if it's enabled) and set your graphics as low as you can stand.

This could be either that your video is overheating, or that you've got driver errors that aren't being recognized. Have you checked your Event Viewer for errors around the time of the restarts? Have you run "perfmon /report" from the Start button? Have you searched your hard drive for files ending in .dmp (usually in C:\Windows\Minidump)?

Thank you USASMA for your reply to my post. I really do appreciate it.

I started in the order of your post to check on different things. First thing I came to were my chipset drivers, and it is showing my driver as version 6.14.10.4656 and 6.14.10.4656. Is yours also showing two chipset groups? These are dated back to 2006, but when I went to Toshiba's site for Vista support, the m45-s269 is not supported on their site for driver updates. Automatic updates show that there is no new drivers available for this.

Going past that on to the second part of what you mentioned, the only driver problem I am seeing is an driver install failure, but that is for my mp3 player, as I was trying to install it while in safe mode during this and it would not install. That's the only possible conflict I am seeing.

I was never able to use Aero because I am XDDM, but my graphics are set to the lowest for system performance.

I admit that I did not know about the Event Viewer, and I am looking through system errors now. I am going to focus on today because I assumed that errors would be recorded somewhere (just wasn't sure were) so I allowed my computer to start in normal mode to have a timely read when I could. In the system log, I have a few warnings/errors:

"The service 'TabletInputService' may not have unregistered for device event notifications before it was stopped."

and quite a few of these:

"DCOM got error "1084" attempting to start the service ShellHWDetection with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{DD522ACC-F821-461A-A407-50B198B896DC}"

I tried to run the "perfmon /report" and received this error:

"The system cannot find the path specified."

And finally after searching "everywhere" for a ".dmp" file, I turned up with nothing.

I hope I answered all your questions in enough detail, I definitely appreciate your response, and if there is anything needing clarification, I will get that to you ASAP.

Best Wishes.

---

Member Edit - I just got the latest drivers available from Intel's site for my chipset family. Going to restart and if there are no issues after that I will repost.

My M45 no longer has Vista on it. I donated it to my wife's office (which is XP based), so I reinstalled XP on it.

What I did was go to the Toshiba downloads page for the M45 and found out the hardware description of each piece of hardware there. Then I searched the web for Vista drivers for those pieces of hardware. The easiest (as I recall) was the Intel chipset and the video - and I got the drivers from their website. The most difficult was the SD Card Reader - and I found a Vista driver for that at the HP website.

I suspect that there's a glitch in one of your drivers that results in the shutdown. Locating the chipset and the video drivers will likely cure this - but I can't guarantee that.

I've still been going over things, and cannot figure out exactly what it is. All my drivers seem to check out. Then I got really really frustrated and tried something different which made me think this is possibly not windows related?

I got mad and decided to try out Ubuntu, the whole "I hate Windows right now" temper tantrum.

While Ubuntu was loading from an CD image, the computer restarted all by itself like it does while I am running windows. However, I wasn't running windows.

That got me to wondering, could it be my power source that is causing these intermittent outages? My battery lasts hardly 10 minutes without the power supply plugged in, and I was wondering if after all this time it could be as simple as that?

Well, it has been seven hours now running without the battery in my laptop, only using the A/C adapter to power the computer. Longest my computer has stayed on at one time, so I think I may have solved the problem?

Thanks for you help though usasma! I appreciated you taking the time to give me some ideas on where to look.

Hopefully if this does work, and someone else has this exact problem, they will come along and see the site and find another possible solution now.