Computer turning on by its self?

[BalliN]

This is a question I've juss got to ask.

I was talking to this lady about her computer and she told me that when she turns off her pc and goes down stairs she hears it come back on! Now I feel that I'm fairly computer literate :eek: but this is something that I've never seen or heard of before.

I'm thinkin that she never turned it off and must have hit restart instead.

This is her first pc since a very old 386 with win95 she had before that she didn't use very often and there for she doesn't know very much about pc's

My question is does anyone know what may cause this (if its even possible) before I tell her its user error :D

Thanks,

BalliN

[larva]

Usually three things cause this type of problem.

1) power supply issues

2) motherboad issues

3) faulty PCI card

Of the three believe it or not it usually proves to be a PCI card. I'd remove all expansion cards except the video and see if it behaves.

[Tebore]

If it's connected via a network card make sure Wake on LAN is disabled.

[BalliN]

Ok cool then, guess I will try that. I talked to her the other day over the phone and she told me that she would hit shutdown then push the button to turn it off. I told her that she doesn't need to push the button on the case cause it will shutdown by its self. she did that and it worked fine. I had her shut the thing on and off 3 times juss to make sure LMAO.

Well guess since there could be some truth to this I'll go pick it up :mad:

Oh and no WOL

Thanks Larva :D

BalliN

Edit: And this doesn't seem to happen all the time so gonna be hard to track down

[don256us]

I have had users complain of this before. Here is what I have found.

I get this same complaint usually after I have worked on the affected machine. When I work on the machine, I use the reboot option when shutting down. Win 9x/ME/NT/2k remembers that I selected 'reboot'. When the user goes to shutdown, Windows is still set to 'reboot'. The user doesn't think to look. They assume that it is set to 'shutdown'. They do the normal routine and walk away only to have the machine boot back up.

I wish that the following statement weren't true but: I get this complaint far more than I should. I work for a local government with over 100 Win95/NT machines.

[wanna_b_rich_13]

There are viruses out there that will cause this to happen as well.

[PingSpike]

My guess would either be she's selecting the wrong shutdown routine (reboot instead of shutdown) or WOL. Those the most obvious. User error is the biggest cause of problems in my experience.

[Jognt]

ghosts... really, ghosts exist, and sometimes they pull stunts like this lol :D

though the reason is waaaaaaaaaaay more often that they press the wrong button, or press the power button even though the PC shuts itself down lol :)

[Loud]

I recently built a rig for a friend, and it does this very thing.

The owner and I are both quite certain that the box is shut down ... all the way off ... and after a while (sometimes as little as 30 minutes, sometimes hours), it powers back up.

I hadn't thought of an errant PCI card. I'll check that out. :D

[BalliN]

Loud.........think its the same problem. I went over there yesterday never saw it happen for myself, but she told me that it can be off for a day and juss come back on.

The board I put in there is a Gigabyte GA-7N400-L. What board did you use? This board has the ablity to turn on the pc threw the keyboard or double clicking the mouse. All was disabled in bios.

I upgraded the bios while I was there. Hope that works :(

Peace,

BalliN

[Loud]

Originally posted by BalliN
Loud.........think its the same problem. I went over there yesterday never saw it happen for myself, but she told me that it can be off for a day and juss come back on.

The board I put in there is a Gigabyte GA-7N400-L. What board did you use? This board has the ablity to turn on the pc threw the keyboard or double clicking the mouse. All was disabled in bios.

I upgraded the bios while I was there. Hope that works :(

Peace,

BalliN

This box is an ECS K7S5A. I too thought it might be a BIOS problem, so I flashed it current - no change.

The PSU is just the generic P.O.S. that came with the case, so I'm hoping that's the problem. I've told my friend that I need to hijack the box for a few days to track it down.

[BalliN]

Yup.........same problem flashing the bios did nothing lol. Guess I'm gonna have to do the same after new years.........please post back if you find it before me :D

Peace,

BalliN