[staxofmax]

This is my first home-built computer. When I started it up for the first time today it worked perfectly, and continued sailing smoothly through BIOS configuration, the installation of Vista and the motherboard and video card drivers. However, when I tried to put the computer in sleep mode the monitor flashed the BSOD followed by a system restart. When I tried to shut the computer down, it went through the shut-down procedure until the very end when it again flashed the BSOD and restarted. The whole time I was worrying about the computer not starting, and now it won't shut down at all....

Does this sound like a driver/software issue, or a hardware issue? Again, the only software I have installed so far is Vista and the hardware drivers that were provided on CD.

Any and all help would be appreciated!

[Rich-M]

Right Click My Computer, choose properties and then Advanced System Settings, Startup and Recovery and uncheck "auto restart. This will give you an error message you can read and we really need that to help you....unless your bsod is already giving you something ytou simply have not told us.
Sounds like either there is a bios setting whacked and you could check power management in there to make sure there are no wakeups being called for, or a driver issue of a device that is old and cannot shut down, reminiscent of some older Creative soundcards a while back in XP.

[staxofmax]

I'll have to post the message tonight, as I'm in the office right now.

So far I haven't been able to glean anything useful from the BSOD, as it flashes for a fraction of a second before the computer restarts.

[staxofmax]

Well, I finally isolated the error message. It indicated that an ATI device driver referenced an incorrect memory location. When I loaded windows in safe mode, and attempted a shutdown from there, the computer successfully shut down. I will install the latest driver software for my video card, and hopefully this should solve the problem.

[Rich-M]

First I would uninstall the old one so Windows does not get confused....

[staxofmax]

The new ATI driver had an upgrade utility that successfully superseded the old driver software. Computed can shut down now! Problem solved.

[Rich-M]

Great why not use "thread tools" here up top of post and mark it "solved".