Right click on My Computer and select manage.

What I meant was if you use a large screen saver this will keep the computer busy during the "idle" time and it may not crash, was just for an experiment!:yep:

I foundz 'em when I went in to disable the automatic restart. :)

Ah. Gotcha.

Well, anyway, I was able to pinpoint exactly what was causing the crash - I turned it on when I got home and sat here and filed my nails waiting to see what would happen. As soon as the Norton automatic backup started - boom. Nothing came up on the blue screen that gave me a specific file or error info to look into though. I rebooted and ran the backup manually - boom. Same thing. Disabled the auto backup feature and left for 2 1/2 hours, letting every other idle background task go on as usual - no problems. Still up and running when I came home.

I still don't know if it's a Norton problem per se - which seems doubtful, since I've used that feature on two computers running the same O/S and basically the same programs and configs and whatnot without any problem up til now. I rather suspect that a file got corrupted or deleted somewhere, or else something changed that made the Norton backup conflict with something else. I do use the Windows backup program to back up my entire C drive to one external drive, but that's scheduled to run only once a month I think and shouldn't have been interfering with the Norton backup over the past couple of days.

I reinstalled the Norton product to see if it will still cause the same error after a clean install - if so I'll just disable the backup feature (which I don't really need anyway, it was one of those things I was just letting go on because it was there and configured and saved a smaller set of files to an alternate external drive. Mostly just a "backup" backup of crucial data files. If I try it and still get a system failure I'll disable it again and pursue the issue with Norton just to make sure it's not caused by something that might give me other problems.

Thanks for all the help and advice, as always!

Your welcome frau kaleun.

I'm glad your narrowed down the problem.

Tweety

Good to hear you found the problem, btw, I use and love Norton Ghost!!:up:

Yeah, I've been using Norton programs since I got my first PC. They've certainly saved my butt on a number of occasions when other things went wrong. Never had a problem using any of them.

Other than the backup crashing my system, lol, which never happened before after over a year of continuous use - we're talking a background program that probably ran at least once a day. I'm gonna configure a minimal backup in there and run it just to see if it still crashes or if the reinstall worked, curious to see what happens.

aha
 

Before configuring the backup I decided to run chkdsk/f on the external drives I back stuff up to. Found and repaired errors on one of them, which may very well have been part (or all) of the problem. Not sure how that happened all sudden like, but whatever. And the backup will now run without crashing my system should I choose to use it. :)