The automatic reboot feature in windows xp is the replacement for the older “blue screen of death”, but has the flaw that the user does not know what has happened...

To disable reboots:

1. Open System Properties (Control Panel|System or right mouse click on My Computer and choose properties or hold down [alt] and double click My Computer)
2. Select the Advanced tab
3. In the Startup and Recovery box click the Settings button
4. In the System Failure box uncheck the Automatically Restart option box
5. Click OK twice to close and finish.

With one computer, the user would turn away to do some other work, then hear the computer working and look back to find it rebooting. This went on for some time and various hardware issues were considered however eventually after finding out about and disabling the automatic reboot we were able to read the error message about the indexing service that had caused the problem in the first place and remedy that. I prefer a message telling me the system needs to close down rather than just having it reboot without notice so I now disable the automatic rebooting on all computers I work with.