Laptop keeps restarting intermittently

[dave_c]

Hi,

I have a toshiba M40x-230 laptop running (Genuine) XP SP3 Home
Pentium M 1.86 GHz
1GB of ram

The laptop keeps restarting itself.
It can happen after 1 minute or an hour.
There doesn't seem to be any pattern.
I'm not using a particular piece of software when it happens.

There is no bluescreen (automatic restart is unchecked)
It is set to write to the minidump but nothing is written there after a restart.

I have run scans with Sbot S&D and I'm running Avast.
Avast has run on boot and not found anything.

Toshiba forums said it could be a heat problem.
I have cleaned out the inside and vents with compressed air and replaced the themal compound on the CPU and GPU.

It has been fine for 4 hours today (I thought I had fixed it with the thermal compound but then it restarted itself)

I have it raised on a flat surface to ensure that there is plenty of ventalation.

Any ideas?

Many thanks,

Dave.

[Allan]

Could be heat, could be faulty ram. Just to absolutely rule out malware, please run a scan with MalwareBytes (Spybot is old school). Also, boot to safe mode and see if the problem occurs there. If it does, then it's almost 100% certain that it's a hardware problem.

[FlashDrives]

First thing you need to do is reinstall or repair install your operating system. After doing this check whether your computer is working fine or not if it is still not working then I think your capacitor is leaking and you need to go your support person.

[Allan]

You may safely ignore the post above.

[dave_c]

On checking the components I have found that the clip that hold the ribbon from the keybpard to the motherboard is broken.

If the keyboard connector moves, would this result in a reboot?

Do you think this could be a possible source of the problem?