Computer restarting when shutting down and then having serious error on startup

[johnnr892]

Hi, my uncle's computer, when being shut down gets to the final stage of shutting down and then restarts just like normal, then when entering windows it says that "windows has recovered from a serious error". Got any ideas guys, any help would be greatly appreciated, Thanks John.

[8bit]

Is it Windows XP on there?

Try detaching all non-essential hardware like printers, scanners, USB memory sticks, ipods etc etc and see if that makes any difference. Then one by one reattach and restart and see what (if any) device makes it start doing that again.

Check the machine for viruses and spyware. Have a look in the event logs under "System" and "Applications" to see if there's any errors which happen about the time of shutdown.

Maybe updating drivers for video card, any soundcards or other multimedia devices (scanners, TV tuners etc) would help. Failing all of the above I'd reinstall the operating system.

HTH
8bit

[MSIC]

It is something i have noticed on a number of machines i have used over the years, and it has either just 'gone away' (possibly from updated drivers, can't really remember) or more commonly a sign that Windows is starting to get a it flakey, and ultimately needed re-installing.

Rationally, i would guess that some application has probably been installed then uninstalled but not done a full job, hence the error.

[johnnr892]

Hi, thanks for the quick responses. I'm in the process of doing what you described and i'm trying to clean up programmes and sort out the antivirus software and other drivers. One thing to note is that microsofts online crash analysis, for what it is worth suggests that it is
"Error caused by a device driver"
"A device driver installed on your computer caused the problem"

So I'm going to try and work through updating drivers etc...but recently iTunes was installed as well and it seems to have been happening since then, so I'll let you know what happens, thanks, John.