No warm boot

My son has a Gateway system with XP PRO and can't "Restart" his computer all the time it sometimes shuts down completly. It only has a "Cold boot" button on it. Is there something we can do to make it warm boot from "Restart "?
Thanks
Don

 

Hi Don,

Welcome to the board.

Are you absolutely certain that there's no restart button? The one on my case is so small it has to be actuated with a paperclip, pen point, etc. In fact, if you didn't know it was there you'd never see it.

Absent that, if the computer is still under warranty, I'd contact Gateway.

 

Hi Don,

My Asus motherboard would crash on Restart. Solved by a BIOS upgrade. If you want to try a BIOS upgrade and haven't done one before, follow the instructions carefully.

Matt

 

Thanks for the quick response. I looked all over and didn't find a pin hole anywhere. I will check for a bios update and try that. Hope that fixes the problem.

Once again thanks for the info
Don Piersant

 

There a setting in the BIOS that tells the machine what to do after a failure. Shutdown or Restart?

I'm thinking, when he clicks "Start" then "Restart" and the machine sometimes does restart and sometimes shuts down, could it possibly be a failure of the OS, maybe a virus or worm? Just thinking out loud.

Martin

 

In Control Panel, Power Options
You can set some buttons to do different things (stand by, do nothing, restart etc) Might be a good idea to see how those are set. Do I understand that when he clicks "restart ", the computer shuts down completely?

Johanna

 

Hi Johanna: When I read his post, my understanding is that when he clicks restart, sometimes it does, and sometimes the machine shuts down completely. Apparently itermittant behaviour.. Which brings up another question, why is he looking for a reset button?

Martin

 

From MS KB

And if you have Roxio (Easy CD Creator), look here.

More ideas here.

While you are troubleshooting, disable the "auto restart" as described in the first link. The error messages may give you the clues you need right away. (I keep my auto restart OFF all the time, because it is a nuisance when I get into trouble and get an endless loop of reboots)

To be fair, these ideas came from Kellys-Korner select "S" and scroll to "Shutdown "

Let us know how you're doing.

Johanna
ps Newt, this may be XP after all...

 

Bob ...

Don said that his son's computer [case] had only a "Cold Boot" button on it, so I asked if he was absolutely certain that there was no reset button (unlike laptops, all but one of the desktop computers with which I'm familiar have one). His response was "No ".


Don ...

I don't have a good answer for you, but you might try this ...

Create a shortcut, either on the Desktop on on the Start menu and, name it RESTART or REBOOT and, in the icon's Target window, type C:\WINDOWS\system32\shutdown.exe -r -t 0.

You can do the same for SHUTDOWN and LOG OFF if you like ... the command is the same, but replace -r with -s for shutdown and -l for log off. The -t sets the time in seconds before the command executes. 0 tells it to execute immediately.