Windows 7 restarting automatically? Long live event logs.

Is your windows OS restarting automatically?

This post shall be useful in case if this problem started after you started using an airtel  3G modem. It happens that on an airtel installation, there is an update service that gets installed and started. In my case it was the culprit.

The trick to find out the root cause for frequent reboots is the event log. You can find the event log in the control panel. You can just type “log” in the search window on the right and the first result takes you to the logs.

Click on view event log. Then navigate to Windows Logs > System. After clicking on the system, just  wait as the logs load up. Browse through and search for winlogon in the source. Just below that or may be couple of rows below that you shall find the reasons for the restart. Look for some more occurrences of winlogon and if the same reasons precede it, then you have just nailed the culprit.

In my case it was the update service being triggered by the airtel/huwaei modem. It seems the same live update service is used for other manufactures also ending up in clashes. So just went to windows+R –> msconfig –> Services tab and disabled the airtel .OUC service. And that’s it.

Event log..someone thought of logging and made our lives easier. We too log loads of stuff. Its important to find issues in our applications. But its critical to know what to and how much to log. Else even logging can turn out to be a menace.

More on logging may be in the next blog..