Spontaneous reboots - NO BSOD

Since my last post, I've had two crashes - one un-witnessed and one witnessed (upon bootup this morning).

No .dmp file was produced.

Since I never see a BSOD, I kind of suspected this would happen. My crashes are hard and fast, just like a complete power failure within the machine. They occur whether running on the power adapter or battery.

So I believe my next step will be to do the hardware stress test. After that, I will try limiting what starts up at boot and slowly add programs back in.

Pauly, if you think I'm going about it wrong, please tell me how you'd do it. I'm not sure what you meant above by "Option 2, Step 2".

Pauly said:

Just had a reread of thread you mentioned windbg but you havent uploaded any dump files check your %sysroot%\windows\minidump folder for any and upload if there

Pauly,
Earlier, you had pointed me to the BSOD Analysis - Getting Started thread.

So I had followed those instructions and no dump was produced when my machine crashed.

Now I've followed your Option 2, Step 2 instructions to produce a minidump. Will report to you whether or not a minidump is produced when the next crash occurs. I'm skeptical that anything will be produced since there is never a BSOD. The machine goes through a hard reboot sequence when it crashes.

I ran the hardware stress test suggested in the "BSOD Analysis - Getting Started" thread for about 3 hours earlier, while I was away from the computer. I saw nothing to indicate that any hardware failed.

Still monitoring. No spontaneous reboots since yesterday morning.

Pauly said:

... I still wonder if your easiest option is the clean boot we talked about before, that would remove everything from the startup routine and all non MS services.

If it were me i would do this and just use computer as normal to see how it goes, if you need to use something you turned off you will just have to start it manually each time you want to use it, heck it might even give you a better idea of whats causing the crashes ?!?

I prefer having definitive diagnostics when possible, but it is looking like that may not be possible (if I can't produce anything to examine and diagnose, such as the minidump). For the time being, I'm waiting for a crash to see if the minidump will be produced when it crashes again.

If no minidump is produced, then I'll revert to your clean boot method. The trouble with the clean boot/add applications-in-as-you-need-them is that you still might not be able to get to the root of the problem. If you produce a crash while running an application or 2 or 3, you still can't definitively say what caused the crash.

I will read the links you provided. Thanks for your continued support. I truly appreciate it.

Aha! I just had a crash. The bad news: No minidump produced. The good news: I'm starting to see a pattern.

My network connection is wifi from a Linksys wireless access point. Since prior to the crashes that I had yesterday, I've had no network trouble. A few minutes ago, I was trying to use my iPod touch and noticed the network was down. Sure enough, the computer had crashed. Now, how can a network crash cause the computer to crash? I rebooted the WAP and then rebooted the computer. All is well.

Any ideas?

The iPod touch has been off the network since early yesterday morning. Bringing it back to connect through the WAP seems like it might be the impetus for this whole thing. I'll consult my networking guru and see if she has any insights.

But how does a network crash bring the Windows 7 computer down? I guess I could disable the wireless network adapter in the ASUS laptop and connect a USB wireless device to see if that makes a difference. I can do that.

Well, so much for relating the crashes to the network... at least for now. Have had several crashes that I cannot relate to any network problem. So now I've tried a clean boot. My plan was to see how it ran before adding any programs back in and while I was typing this, it just did a reboot. I was running task manager. I also noticed that my ESET Smart Security was running. I'll try shutting that off and just using the Microsoft firewall and antivirus.