Hey guys...I recently built a system for a client (Gigabyte GA7ZX mobo, Duron700), and lately, if he doesn't cut the power source off, the system boots itself up after 15-20 min. He assures me he shuts it down properly -- it's not just in standby, and I disabled the Hibernate feature of WinME myself. What the heck's going on here?

hmmm bios setting for wake on lan or wake on? if those are disabled ,maybe a ghost likes to surf.

Virus? about two or three weeks ago, i acquired some VSB virus's on my lan (visual basic virus) and those tricky devels are writing the scripts to actualy ((not sure about booting)) but to connect to the internet and go BACK home in order to download the "rest of itself" so that it could install itself even FARTHER into my system..not only that, but to invade all my email lists (internet explorer only) and attatch itself to every single person in my address book!! AND IT WOULD'VE WORKED, EXCEPT FOR THE FACT THAT I DONT EMAIL VIA IE..plus i wasnt runing any virus detetection systems .. <--I know DuH!! but anyhow, I spoke about this to my friend whos studying Visual Basic and he explaind to me that its Very possible to overtake sombody's pc and program or Re-program the total hell out of it if they so desired...as far as the viruses on my pc I finaly won that battle but, after seeing and being forced to belive what I saw, I'm willing to at least consider anything at this point, even at the risk of sounding paranoid haha!! QUESTION, does scheduled tasks have the ability to start your computer/? that's an idea ..er .. isnt it eheh? Thomas does the computer do anthing after booting itself.. or just sit there?

Check the motherboard manual, you may be supply your pci cards 3V stand-by. There should be a jumper to disable 3VSB.

I had a problem similiar to this with a computer I built for a customer and it turned out to be the case. It seems that the pins on the back of the switch had the ability to make contact with the chassis of the case. Periodically the PC would reboot for no reason. Since ATX motherboards do not have a physical switch and the power switch just closes a low voltage contact for a second, there were no sparks or arcing that you might have seen with an AT case. The fix was simply to bend the conatcts on the back of the switch and allow more clearance.

my motherboard is a via chipset. my problem is my cpu cannot standby or hibernate, when i set it to standby it will automatically boot up after 1 or 2 seconds. thanks.

Good suggestions...I'll check the soft power contacts, the WOL settings, and I didn't quite understand the 3V PCI standby issue, John.