I have this problem after I download some movie and want to play it the comp just shuts down and then restarts,anyone has any thoughts on what could cause this?
have win98 IE which otherwise works great.
thnx

The MPAA is watching you!

might be a memory problem?

First we have to determine whether it is a software or hardware problem. I'd guess software.

For a system reboot there are usually two culprits, One is a careful crafted attack that can disconnect a modem but doesn't usually shut a computer down (other than the RPC attack, but thats on Win2000/XP machines)

The other culprit is Hardware, if there is a hardware conflict or the resources are too great they can cause the system to fail. Also if the temperature of the machine creeps up it can to have an effect.

Since your using Win98 you should be aware that particular version of windows suffers from appauling bad memory management, it basically means that if your system is using memory, it will keep looking to use fresh areas of memory and not cleaning the memory thats no long in use. This eventually causes an overflow where you run out of memory in the system, usually resulting in a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).

As I've mentioned in other threads there are programs out there that will attempt to clean your RAM conservatively, so that you can get a little more life expectancy out of your OS's uptime. One such program can be found here:
http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/system/maxmem.htm

If you set that program up it can run in the background and attempt to empty used memory.

There is one last possibility, that the movie you download is corrupt or you have the wrong codec. What has been mentioned in the other thread is either getting another program or a hexeditor and opening the file up so you can see the first lines of it to work out either what codec it is, or if it's actually executing code.