So I was minding my own business the other day, when my remaining Windows box took a dump. 

This was apparently a continuation of the last time it went wonky for no particular reason.  It’s a bit difficult to diagnose a computer that spontaneously reboots itself.

After a few tries, I managed to get the computer into a loop, where it would spontaneously reboot, try to go into Windows, never make it, then spontaneously reboot again.   Now there’s progress for you!

Failing safe mode, I tried an OS repair. 
It spontaneously rebooted during the repair too.

I removed hardware.
It spontaneously rebooted.

I removed half the memory.
It continued to spontaneously reboot.

I ran all sorts of intensive tests on memory, hard drives, and processor.
No luck.

I subbed out the kooky cdrw drive that never really worked right.
It spontaneously rebooted

Now there’ s nothing there but a video card. 

I ran Spinrite to beat up the hard drive.  It took forever, then refused to let me stop it.  Two hours later I came back and discovered that the reason it wouldn’t let me stop it was that the pc was FROZEN, yet Spinrite appeared as if it was working.

This is not looking good.  It’s the second pc to go in as many months (they’re surge-protected and ups’d).

Meanwhile at work…
we couldn’t get into a firewall at one of our units.
We called to find out why and the answer was obvious:  a contractor was hired to do some networking.  Unable to get into the firewall, he simply reset it, completely destroying all the work we did to configure it.

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