Computer mysteriously rebooting - solution

My laptop (Compaq Presario x1000) started rebooting by itself in November... The problem was getting worse every week. I was convinced it was a hardware issue. So I used HP's online chat support to ask for help.

First, they asked me to uninstall WinXP's SP2... I knew that wouldn't work but figured I would follow their advice as a necessary step before they would authorize a "return to depot" warranty repair.

So I uninstalled SP2... A painful process that left me without drivers for many key components - most notably my display. I struggled with minimal display settings and made it back to the Compaq/Hp website where I downloaded the latest drivers and re-installed them.

About 5 hours later, while I was in the middle of a long email, the friggin computer rebooted again. I was pretty upset. I thought more carefully about when the rebooting was happening and came to the conclusion that the rebooting was related somehow to Internet Explorer.

So I fired up my installed version of Firefox and set it as my default browser, then I "uninstalled" Internet Explorer. You can't actually uninstall IE (they say you can but you can't). I went through the "uninstall" motions anyway.

Seemed promising for a while... But two days later, it rebooted again.

I was actually happy about this... I figured it would be enough for the Compaq/HP support people to authorize a repair. So back online I went and began a chat session. Instead - they solved the problem. They advised me to right-click on the "My Computer" icon, select Properties, Advanced, Startup and Recovery, and unclick the restart automatically option box. Then, back at the Advanced tab, they advised me to disable the error reporting option.

It's been over a week so far - no unintentional reboots.