I am running Windows XP with a P4 on an Asus motherboard, not overclocked, I built 5-6 years ago.
When I try to restart the system during normal usage, it shuts down and has problems turning back on.
A small surge of power shows when I press the power button but quickly turns off. I turn the main power supply switch off for a few seconds then on, as I press the power button the system turns on but does nothing, no cd-rom spin up no hard drive spin up. I turn off/on the main power again and the cd-rom spins up but the system hangs, no beep nothing on screen. I press the reset button and the system returns to normal as if nothing happened. Some of these steps I do repeatedly 2-5 times before I get a response. Sometimes the BIOS opens with a warning to the side claiming the CPU speed is wrong. When I choose save and exit the system shuts down, when I choose discard changes and exit the system starts fresh. Other than that the system runs fine
This is quite annoying, especially when I am required to restart the system after installs or changes. Thank you for reading, can anyone help? If you need more information, please ask.

Try going into BIOS and resetting system defaults and then let it restart to see if that helps

I noticed that when I try to turn the computer back on shortly after it crashes, it will not. So I waited an hour, after it crashed, before I attempted to turn it on again.
It turns out that the computer was over heating from dust collected on the cpu heat sink. :rolleyes:
Considering I built the computer I managed to take it apart and give it a good thorough dust cleaning. I also removed the heat sync, cleaned the old thermal silicon off, and bought some "arctic silver" silicon from radio shack to use instead of the cheaper stuff. (Be extra careful when attempting this.)
I put everything back together, turned it on with no problems, and tried to restart it from the windows menu.
Works like it should now. :D
If anyone has any questions with what I did, please message me. :cool:

Glad to hear