Restarting problems

[MJMoore]

Hi, first post here, directed here by southernlady.

My system started to become unstable a few days ago, and in the middle of a system restore, I had a power disruption (the plug got knocked ), and obviously windows then had problems. I ended up doing a complete reformat.

At the moment I only have a few programs on it, but it's still restarting on random occasions (usually, it seems, when i'm downloading).

I'm not too bad with computers, but this is where I start getting stuck! I've been to the event viwer, and have the following:

AMLI: ACPI BIOS is attempting to read from an illegal IO port address (0xcfc), which lies in the 0xcf8 - 0xcff protected address range. This could lead to system instability.


I believe I saw this message a few times when I was investigating just before the reformat.

After that is:
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x100000d1 (0x00000400, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0xf83b9a96). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini011906-02.dmp.

I can find the minidump, but am unable to read it.

When I investigated the first message in google, I found the following page, which seems to point to a BIOS problem. http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;317513
As the pc is 4 years old, I guess that could be possible. However, a BIOS update is something I have never attempted, and makes me very nervous.

It's an Evesham Athlon 1.06 running Windows XP SP2

I would appreciate any ideas or help.

[Mobo]

Hi and welcome.

Lets start with the most obvious and reset the system bios to its default settings.


Upon rebooting you will see a brief message telling you to hit a certain key to enter setup. Hit the appropriate key and that will take you into the bios.

Once there I want you to look for the option to reset the defaults. Do so then press f10 followed by esc and if it asks to save the changes select yes and exit.

Now reboot and see if things change.

[MJMoore]

Is it possible to cause any problems doing that? Nothing seems to be going right for me right now, and I really am nervous of causing more problems.

[MJMoore]

On the main page there are no options - in each section it says 'F6=Fail-Safe defaults' and 'F7=Optimised defaults'. I'm not sure which I need?

[Mobo]

F6 for failsafe defaults

[MJMoore]

Thank you.
Of course, after posting this morning, everything has been stable, including downloading. I'll wait for it to start playing up again, then I'll go in and set to default.. that way I can see if it makes any difference.

I've also been advised to try disabling the ACPI.. does that sound like a good next move if problems continue?

[Mobo]

I would wait and see if this sticks before disabling ACPI..