Onboard NIC causing reboots

[RamonGTP]

The last few days my PC had been acting a bit strange, every once in a while it would just randomly reboot, today it got pretty bad. At first I thought maybe I had my mobile Barton OCed too high, even though it had not caused any problems for months prior, but then again, it is hotter now. So....

Step 1:
Brought the OC down some. Got into windows alright, then a short while later it rebooted again.

Step 2:
Relaxed memory timings. Same result

Step 3:
Now i'm thinking I either have a bad ram stick, or my CPU is starting to die. I brought my timings back to a pretty aggressive 2-2-2-11. Loaded windows and ran Prime95 for a while. No errors, no reboots, hmmm....

Step 4:
Ran Western Digital Data lifeguard utlity (Extended test) while that's running I realized the only time it would reboot was when transferring data through the network. Once the drive finished testing (successfully) I shut down the PC, installed a PCI NIC, disabled onboard NIC, went into windows and VIOLA! No more reboots!

It took me a while to finally figure it out since I wouldn't have thought an onboard NIC could have caused such issues, espicially one that was actually working as far as passing traffic goes. Has anyone else had similar problems? Not necessarily this exact scenario, but any issues in which the cause was something you really didn't expect? I figure it may be helpful information if I run accross an odd problem in which the obvious causes check out ok. This was on an ABIT NF7-S btw.

[Steve R Jones]

Turning off the Auto Reboot function in Control Pannel->System->Advanced tab->Startup & Recovery is generally a good thing to do.

Will generally cause a BSOD that will give info on what's causing the problem.