computer rebooting when loading WMP9

[jimi_81]

hey guys...

a friend just brought his computer down for me to have a look at...he was complaining about things being slow, and he really wanted to start fresh, so we formatted, installed all of his software and did a nice little norton ghost backup image of the drive...so future installations will take minutes not hours...

anyhow, so i was running the liveupdate, getting everything set and he decides to take over the computer for a minute, and loads up media player 9, and the "Opening" screen flashes, and then bang.. black screen...reboot.

he then tells me that this problem was happening before...

i suspect it could be his video card, or ram...he not a gamer... his system is a little older... 384 megs of ram, P3 833 processor i believe... with an ATI 8500LE video card....

has anyone had this problem before?
What exactly is windows media player doing during the opening screen, i personally never use it.... is there some kind of 3d display that pulls from the video card? or could it just be chewing into a faulty chunk of ram?


thanks guys, i decided to post this because i always see good things come out of questions like this..

 

[dreamliner77]

1) turn off auto reboots and see what the error message is
2) try running memtest86 to see if it is faulty ram

 

[jimi_81]

auto reboots... what service is that again?
I remember seeing a "Restart" action in the RPC section..

i will definitely run the mem program.
thanks man

 

[dreamliner77]

go to System Properties/advanced/startup and recovery