Instead of getting the friendly blue “Welcome” screen, my system just restarts.

Now here’s the series of events that led to this. I don’t want to leave any details out since I’m really not sure if this is a hardware issue or an OS issue. About a month ago, my power supply got really hot and shut itself off. As soon as it cooled down, it came back to life and seemed to be working OK…no more overheating issues. A few days ago, my system started doing strange things (Sygate firewall asking permission for IE to access google.com, file DL speeds slowed drastically). That same day, I had just received a stick of RAM in the mail and I went ahead and installed it despite the peculiar system behavior. The memory seemed to be working, but my system was still acting strange. I had just installed a new program the day before, so I did a system restore to rule that out as the problem. XP was about halfway through the system restore when *POOF* my power supply fails. Dead computer. I installed a new PSU and the system just restarts itself over and over again.


Please help!

Hi dyenamic,

it could be a couple of things...drivers or power supply.

easiest thing - can you boot into safe mode? IF so, reinstall chipset drivers.

Thanks for the quick reply GaRHaR!

Safe mode won't work either.

The power supply is a brand new Rosewill RT550-135-SL.

Just for fun, I tried running it with nothing but a video card...made no difference.

Ok, good start testing that out.

You may have to do a repair install of windows to get back into it (this won't delete any of your data) and then we can try and figure out what caused it.

How do I do a "repair" install?

Insert your Windows XP cd, boot off it and follow the instructions to do a repair install...it gives you clear options.

I did the repair install, but now instead of restarting, it says "Setup is being restarted...", then it gives me this message:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
The Windows Logon Process system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0x00000080 (0x00000000 0x00000000).
The system has been shut down.

Does it matter that I didn't use the same copy of XP that was originally installed on the machine?