Thread: How to solve the restarting problem of Computer in the middle of the night time

solve the Computer restarts in the middle of the night at times

Last night at 3am I heard an error prompt and then shutdown music. Then my computer started back up immediately after. This has happened several times now, only at night (maybe once a week or two), possibly but not certainly at the same time. Firefox is able to recover but Office is not! And I've already lost hours of work from not saving frequently enough.

I have Windows XP SP2
McAfee Virus Scan 8.5.0i

I'd include all my hardware but I'm assuming this is a software or malware related issue. Is it possible this is a scheduled event for windows or the virus scan software?

You are most likely getting an Automatic Windows Update that requires a restart. That happens with mine too - sometimes I hear it and it wakes me up, and sometimes I don't. I know that my PC restarted last night

Thanks for the heads up,. I appreciate your help. How do I disable this? I'm currently working on a dissertation with multiple drafts of multiple documents. I don't want to turn on the auto save feature in case I need to reverse what I've done. I can't afford to keep losing work like this. Microsoft frustrates the hell out of me. You'd think Windows would be smart enough to create recovery files for Office. When is that update coming!?

Just turn off your Automatic Window Updates and do it manually whenever it's a good time for you. I try to turn the computer off every other day or so to save electricity, but I usually have several documents open at once and sometimes it's a lot easier to just leave them open so I can get going quickly on whatever I was working on. I live in Arizona, so if it were going to freeze from or shutdown from overheating of the cup, it would do it during the day.

You can check the Event Viewer (Control Panel | Administrative Tolls | Event Viewer) to see if it lists what caused the restart, either an update or an error. Tuesday is update day, so the timing is right for a restart required by an automatic update. This week's updates did require a restart.

In the System log, you should see three entries with a source of Event log at about the time the system restarted. One is the system shutting down; the next two are when it restarted. This will give you the exact time so you can check the other logs. I'd expect the system would fail to restart, and would be stuck with a dialog asking if you wanted to save the file rather than forcing Office to close. Maybe Windows just assumes you are using the auto save feature.