unexpected shutdown

I'm experiencing unexpected shutdowns of Vista at apparent random times. It
just closes every program and happily turns off and restarts my computer out
of the blue. I haven't been able to make any connection between this and
anything I was doing at the time it happens, in my attempt to understand
what's going on. It has only happened three times so far, two of those times
seem to have started when I attempted to download a file and the third time
it occurred when I started a cmd.exe session.

If anybody has experienced this or similar behaviour in Vista or has any
helpful idea, please respond.

Ihave a brand new machine and have experienced unexpected (random) reboots too. The best I can tie it down at present is with Windows Movie Maker when attempting to retrieve DV from a camcorder in 7 or 8 attempts each time there has been a reboot after a period of 2 to 5 minutes.

Probably unrelated, I am experiencing random accessing of the floppy (A:) drive - similar to that which occurs during boot up. So far this accessing has not been associated closely with the rebooting problem other than the frequency of disk access is greater when I am downloading DV.

I am also experiencing unexpected shutdowns. I have an HP Entertainment
laptop that I purchased in Feb of this year. It will randomly shutdown. It
seems at first it happend mostly when I was streaming music/videos or when I
was ripping a CD, but has occured other times as well. My favorite is when
it happens while my maching is in sleep mode. I took it in and the techs
couldn't find any thing wrong. When it starts to shut down I will hear this
obnoxious clicking noise and then a blue screen will appear that says that an
unexpected error had occured. From there my machine will restart and then I
will get the "Windows wasn't shutdown properly" screen. After that all is
well for a few more days. Any suggestions? I am very unhappy about the
situation considering how much I paid for this product.

I've just built a new pc and I'm getting random reboots too. my spec is
as follows...

Vista Ultimate 32bit
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz
Abit AB9 Pro Motherboard
OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC2-6400C4 Dual Channel Platinum
BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 320MB
SATA 2 300GB Seagate Barracuda
Corsair HX 620W ATX2.2 PSU

My rig is water cooled and has fans, so I know it's not a temprature
thing. The 620W power supply was £100 and has very good reviews so I've
got more then enough juice. I've swapped the memory sticks with a
friends pc but still it reboots. I've tried different Nvidia drivers
including beta drivers, I've even tried swappig the video card with a
friend who has the same card. I've formatted it several times, tried
installing vista onto a spare 200gig IDE drive but still no joy, I even
flashed my motherboard bios which I think has made the random reboots
less frequent but can't really be too sure.
Being Vista the memory dumps are usless and don't give me any
explination to why it unexpectially shut down. So it could be the
motherboard or cpu? but I'm hoping it's just a vista issue and that the
upcomming release of service pack 1 will help.

How frequently?

Try booting in safe mode and running some stuff - if it does not reboot
then hardware looks OK and it points to a driver issue...?

It could be temperature - no really it could... check the waterblocks
are all seated correctly and check all the fan's airflow - no reversed fans?

Unplug/remove anything you can from the system and try running as an
absolute minimum sytem... add bits until it starts falling over.

Maybe boot off a Linux Live CD/DVD (Ubuntu/Knoppix etc) and run as a
Linux system... play a few card games and see if it reboots... this will
eliminate all possible Windows OS/driver issues...

If it still reboots in Linux it must be hardware/temperature/memory related.

Can't think of any other approaches for now...

Not sure if this is the same problem...
I just recieved a new laptop w Vista. I am using my machine and it will
suddenly shutdown and the turn back on. When I run the check for
solution after the reboot I am shocked. The error report gave me this
for an answer:

'[image: http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/8158/lolbs2.th.jpg]'
(http://img88.imageshack.us/my.php?image=lolbs2.jpg)

Problem caused by: Microsoft
Recommendations: Install sp1

It seems Microsoft really wants people to intall service pack 1,
however, they may just be making more users disgruntled. You tell me.

My Vista machine runs fine without SP1.

What firewall, anti-virus application or security suite is installed?

I have the latest ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite installed on
my laptop. I found out more that may help. Since my laptop was fresh it
has stock settings as expected. One of those settings in regards to
power plan was for my laptop to sleep after 10 minutes. The unexpeceted
restarts were always happening when my computer went into sleep mode.
Just to double check that this was the case I set the laptop to be fully
and always on. The results are so far telling me that this is the case:
Vista sleep mode has issues in some versions of pre-sp1 operating
systems.

***[When responding to posts, please include the post(s) you are replying to
so that others may learn and benefit from the issue]***

Go to Advance Power Settings.

Set hard drive to turn off a minute or 2 before sleep.

Set Hybrid and Hibernate modes to "Never/Off"

Under USB settings select "Disable"

Under Multimedia select "Allow ....."

in my case i think it has to do with some drivers, and software such as
torrent downloading programs. it is such a mess...everytime i start a
torrent my pc automatically restarts. then i stopped every torrent
program imaginable then the restarts stopped happening REGULARLY.. now
they happen randomly especially when i mess with drivers (usually during
their installation), OR when i simply mess with system
settings...arghhhh..i can't do anything to isolate the problem!
help...microsoft needs to do something about their error reporting

Mine has started rebooting recently too.
In my case, I suspect it is one of two things I did recently, but not
sure which yet.

I upgraded my RAM from 1 gig to 2 gigs.
And I also bought a Linksys Router, installed the software, downloaded
updates, bridged the connection to my DSL modem.

I did those two things within 2 days of each other. I didn't notice
any problems after installing the RAM....the computer has had 2
unexpected shutdowns since I installed the Router. But I can't exclude
the RAM as a possibility, at least not yet.

Anyway, any suggestions on where to start looking on my Vista Home
Premium system?
Supposedly, the Linksys software was Vista compatible, but who knows?

I have the same problem as Warhed...
Unexpected restarts almost always happens when I put my computer to sleep. The only difference between me and Warhed is that I manually put my computer to sleep and it's not a power setting thing (to go to sleep after a certain period of time of inactivity).
So I'm not sure if Bob's solution to Warhed can apply to me.
Is there a solution to this troublesome matter?

I have the same also,
half way in the game, unexpected shut down...Blue screen...and have to restart again, the error promt below

Problem caused by nProtect GameGuard (dump_wmimmc.sys)

This problem was caused by nProtect GameGuard (dump_wmimmc.sys), which was created by Inca Internet Co. and is distributed in many different products.

How to resolve this..your help is greatly appreciately

Thanks you vvv much

Hmmm....."Problem caused by nProtect GameGuard"

Seems to me the answer is pretty clear. Either remove the software or
contact their software support for assistance in resolving a problem caused
by their software.

The recommended method of removing nProtect GameGuard Personal 2007 is
through the standard Control Panel feature. Go to Start Menu >> Control
Panel >> Add/Remove Programs and select nProtect GameGuard Personal 2007.

There may be cases where the uninstall file of the program was damaged and
fails to remove the product. In such a case, please download this Removal
Tool and execute it.

Please contact us if you still have difficulties removing the product and we
will assist you right away.