Computer Randomly Restarting

[Steve-O]

My computer randomly restarts on me, even when I am sleeping and it is not running programs. When it restarts it usually gets back in to windows then restarts again, then it finally is stable for a couple hours or more. It really sucks. I am wondering what the trouble may be. I can't remember when it particularly started since it has been going on for awhile. I do remember when I was upgrading to windows 2000 it would crash in the middle of the installation saying an error occurred writing to read only memory. I had to run the installation four times before it finally installed. I have a K6/2 500 with an asus p5a and 465mb ram on windows 2000. The hard drive is fairly new and It hasn't picked up any errors in scan disk or anything. Besides the restarting it runs very well. Any suggestions are very appreciated.

[TommyBoomfiger]

i dont know too much about amd processors, but a K6/2 for win2k??? isnt that pushing it a little bit. anyway, i have a k6/2 which freezes up and restarts on me all the time in win98se. i think its a heat problem for me, so i underclocked it a little bit and it helped for a little bit but wasnt a permenent solution. i still get problems, but not as often, try opening up your case and cleaning out the heatsink (dust can hinder heatsink performance) and putting the box in a cooler area. both of those worked for me. gl

[spigidygak]

Could be the motherboard. There are a lot of craptacular mobos for the k6

[sho.gun]

Or a loose connection somewhere, check the reset wire that hooks up to your mobo.

[rajatQ2]

win2k will fart a lot if you have improper drivers installed.
For example, yesterday i was building my mom a computer and i installed totally wrong drivers, they were either for win98.95 or for the wrong modem, and the computer restarted with no warning. After that whenever anything tried to use the modem, the computer would restart. I went into safe mode w/o networking and unistalled the device, now it works fine.
maybe that could be your problem - some lousy drivers. Btu then again that "unreadable memory" error or whatever it was does not sound good.

[Grimm]

Bad spot on a stick of ram? You can try pulling some of your ram and se if the problem clears up. Did you add ram just before this started happening?