Computer restarting bug

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Recently I have encountered a strange bug. This happens only when I'm playing infinity engine games, recently BG1 and IWD2. After playing for sometime(the time varies, from range 5mins to 4 hours), my computer just restarts itself. This is quite annoying, and I'm afraid that something is broken on my computer. However, this does happen only with infinity engine games. Also it doesn't seem like component overheat problem, as the restart can happen immidiately after the computer has been turned on and I have started playing, or after the computer has been on for hours and I start playing. This started just couple of days ago, and my infinity engine games have been installed for months and behaved well. Any ideas what is causing this weird restarting?

 

If you've got Windows XP, the problem could very well be due to the OS (or some program running within it). One of the "features" in XP is that, if a program (or any process really) crashes and the OS feels everything's going to crash, it will inelegantly reboot the system for you. Not very useful if you're trying to debug, but it saves you pressing the restart button I suppose.

If this is only occurring with IE games and nothing else (try other unrelated games first), then it's probably some shared library that only the IE games are using. You might try uninstalling all of the IE games and resintalling them, but that's really no guarantee (it's utterly useless if the file isn't installed by the games to begin with)

 

My IE games have worked fine with XP for a long time untill just recently. Other games work, as I have played long periods of other games, and my brother who uses the computer when I'm away plays non-IE games and has not encountered any rebooting. However, I have noticed that my IE games won't crash if I continuosly play them. If I leave them alone for a 10-15mins, and then start to play, the computer will restart or has already restarted when I get back.

The only thing I did related to IE games was that I started installing TuTu, but aborted it at mid installation as I noticed it would take too much of my hard drive. After this the only visible bug at first was that autoplay of BG1 couldn't start the game since it was looking stuff from totally different folder and I had to start the game from its own folder. And after this all IE games started having this reboot issue. So it sounds like it might be something like a shared library corrupted if Tutu install affects it. I try re-installing all my IE games to see if it has any effect.

 

I had a similar problem a little while back - it was a driver issue. Did you install anything new recently, especially from a site like Download.com, or a freeware site? If so, try uninstalling it, restarting, and see what happens.

Sorry if it doesn't help.

 

Not that I know of, but it wouldn't be the first time my computer has messed my drivers. I'll try to look on that. The only report I get after my computer has restarted is that windows says that my computer has "recovered from a serious error". I'm not actually quite sure about the exact wording, especially with the error, but it was something like that what windows says after something messes your computer up. Thanks anyways to both of you.

 

If they give you a link to their site, or something, with that error message (it does that sometimes... it says something like "click here for details"), try it out.

 

So, I get the message "your computer has recovered from a serious error".

After clicking error details I get this as error signature:
BCCode : 9c BCP1 : 00000002 BCP2 : 8054D370 BCP3 : F6002000
BCP4 : 0000017A OSVer : 5_1_2600 SP : 2_0 Product : 768_1

And then I clicked the "To view technical information about the error report, click here" and it gives me this:
IDOCUME~1\Heikki\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER43dd.dir00\Mini050306-01.dmp
IDOCUME~1\Heikki\LOCALS~1\Temp\WER43dd.dir00\sysdata.xml
Any ideas?

 

These files are a memory dump of everything that was in RAM when the problem occurred. Unless that can help you figure out the problem, they're not very useful.

I don't know what to say really. There are so many possible reasons for this error. Check if the bunch of numbers in the error signature is the same every time. If it is, then you'll at least know something specific is causing the problem (finding out what is another matter, but you might try running the error codes through the Microsoft website). If the codes vary, the problem could be anything unfortunately.