I recently acquired the components for a new system and built it myself. I kept my cd-rom drive, floppy drive, sound card and hard disk from my previous system. After installing Win98 and a few apps and, in particular, Quake3, it began to freeze up (no mouse, no keyboard) especially when I was online in IE and nearly always when playing Quake3. So I went out and bought a new HDD cause I needed a new one anyway, plus I thought the old one might be the cause of the problems since it had bad sectors. Now I installed Win98 again and Quake3, and yes, got the exact same problem. So I decided to take out all my old devices and just use the new ones and it still froze. I got all new drivers for my video card, IE5.5, got windows updates, basically went through all the usual software upgrades/checks/scans/system utils - you name it - and everything said everything was fine. All the cards are seated fine on the motherboard (i've double checked x99999) and the cpu fan is working fine. The heat sink feels warm but it certainly isn't HOT. I got a new stick of ram and interchanged it with the one I just bought but no dice. Power supply fan is perfect, it just all seems to be working perfectly both hardware and software wise, until it just freezes. Is there something I'm doing wrong?
My system is:

Celeron 733
Nvidia TNT2 Ultra w/32mb on board (AGP)
192mb sdram
WD Caviar 20mb ATA100 7200rpm
Intel 440bx motherboard

Any other info I should supply? Any programs you can recommend that might detect some kind of fault? Is it likely a component fault like the CPU or video card or am I insane??

Thanks, I hope you can help out.

This (http://www.mann20rich.freeserve.co.uk/QUAKE%20III%20ARENA%20(1).htm) may shed some light on your situation http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

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Flush 'N' Forget
FE Stokes WWTP (http://www2.apex.net/users/hwuswtp)

cheers bassvax, you made me consider updating/flashing/whatevering the bios on my video card but i haven't yet. i'm lead to believe that it's not the video card since i tried another video card and the same thing happened. so here's what i did: unfortunately i tried so many things at once that i still haven't pinpointed the exact problem. first i formatted the damn hdd again and reinstalled windows 98 se, with bare essentials (hdd, vga, cdrom, floppy). got thru the installation fine and then installed the modem, went online and started up IE. freeze. kill everything, rip out the modem. settle down. so next i went and disabled everything even remotely associated with power management, both in the bios and the os. still didn't work. i then changed the bios settings to 'setup' and it changed a few things here and there but nothing that really seemed important (something about hdd block? and it changed i think the pnp/pci thing from auto to manual). instead of trying IE and/or quake3 straight away i went into the system configuration utility and under advanced, i checked the box that says 'enable pentium fo (lock cmpXchg) workaround' cause it said something about preventing the malicious use of an instruction set by the processor/co-processor. i dunno what it really means (there's a few other things in there that i'm not totally sure about, anyone know what they mean?), but i went into quake3 and played it for hours on end, the first time it's ever lasted that long (usually its maybe 30-45mins tops). so i was pretty happy, but not totally convinced. i'll have to try it again later and leave it running and play it here and there and see if it's stable. next i install the modem again, hoping against hope that IE works fine. it seems to be, until i go to www.nvidia.com (http://www.nvidia.com) which has a macromedia flash thing on the front page. it loads for a while then freezes. why? i got the latest flash plugins and everything so surely it's not that. i reboot and go into the bios and changed something that's been troubling me for a while: modem irq = 3. the bios was setting it to 3 while in windows it was setting it to irq 9. is that normal/odd/windoz? anyway i just didn't care anymore so i changed it to 9 in the bios and then started up windows and instead of trying to go online right away, i changed the resolution of my screen to 800x600 with 16bit color (before it was set to 1024x768 32bit color). i probably shouldn't have tried that yet but anyway here i am online now, and it all seems to be running smoothly. of course i've only been online for 30mins but the flash on nvidia.com worked fine.

now i guess i'll try it at 1024x768 again to see if that makes any difference. it seems to be either that or the modem irq, although i've set the res to 640x480 with 16 colors before and it froze. who knows? i'll keep updating here though, at least for my own reference, if not for anyone else.

disgruntled goat

Cool http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

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Flush 'N' Forget
FE Stokes WWTP (http://www2.apex.net/users/hwuswtp)

status: hate

after everything i just did, it all amounts to absolutely nothing. it still freezes. it freezes in any res, and always on a site with macromedia shockwave flash. i have no ideas left now. well, apart from 2 or 3:

could it be a bad version of windows 98 se? corrupted perhaps, with corrupted files, corrupting everything i do, and reporting that everything is fine.

could it be hardware? the only things it's down to though are the motherboard, the cpu, and very remotely the video card (i say remotely because i've already tried another card, however it was a pci card, not an agp one like this one. the pci one still didn't work though. the way it freezes though, particularly when it's doing video stuff like flash which i assume is somewhat hardcore work for the card, just makes me think it's a video error somewhere). maybe i should add this too: when i first got the system and i was trying to boot up, there were beep codes pertaining to video problems. so i took out the agp video card and replaced it with the pci video card, and it booted up no problems. i then tried again with the agp card and once again no video. i then went to the store where i bought the parts from and complained about hardware problems, and the guy at the place takes a look at it and says 'ahhh, there it is' and pushes firmly on the cpu card (it's one of those ones that's on a card and goes into a slot - is that 'slot based' ?). he then starts it up and it works fine. does that mean anything? could there be some problem with the cpu/agp slots? or the motherboard in general? or is that mere coincidence?

i can't believe i built this thing, i sound like i know nothing about computers. maybe i shouldn't have. it's so damn annoying. if it's a hardware problem then how can i tell?

my motherboard is all this stuff:
7/03/2000-440bx-ITE8671-2A69KV3IC-00

BIOS I-2M(2K000703)
Award Modular BIOS v4.51pg

video card is:
nvidia TNT2 Model 64 w/32meg (AGP)
2.05.13e (i assume is the video BIOS version)

do i need to update/flash anything?

i don't want to give in! if i take it to the store and show them what happens, i just know they'll say it's a software problem caused by me or the software (even though i can get it to freeze every time). i'm almost deadly positive that i've exhausted all software glitches, except perhaps the win98 install cd.

energumen

oh yeah when i ran the system file checker, it said the file setupx.dll was corrupted and needed to be restored.

now it's saying (i think) swflash.ocx and msisys.vxd have changed. i know when the flash one would've changed, cause i got the flash 5 plugin. could that be causing a problem? havent got a clue what msisys.vxd is though.

energumen

psychronic: Wish I had a clue on your main problem...can easily identify with your frustration! That file msisys.vxd is just a file that changes every time you run SFC. Went haring off once looking for the "corrupted" (possibly) msisys.vxd file for a friend cuz looked like might be important..."Microsoft initiation system"..something like that.

Try and hold on...someday you'll look back on this experience and think "Wow, I learned so much about crabby puters I didn't know before!" and it will be working then. Keep posting..someone here will know what to try next.

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Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life.
-- Chinese proverb

Hey... this sounds exactly like the problems I've been having for months!!
Somethings attacks the Windows Registry every time I reinstall Win98, corrupting the "setupx.dll" file and causing all kinds of error messages, fatal exceptions and system freezes.

Mine is a new computer under warranty that has been taken back to the store 4 times with no resolution. The last time they thought they had it solved, a conflict between the ATI Rage 128 video card and my KDS monitor. I now have an nVidia video card, but the problem remains...

They seem to think at the store that it isn't the RAM, cpu fan, etc...

Please let me know if you've figured out the problem...

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"Believe in me, cause I don't believe in anything... and I wanna be someone who believes" - Counting Crows

I would not count out the possibility of mismatched memory. I remmember once I tried to add 128MB of SDRAM pc133 to a Celeron which had a 64MB SDRAM pc66 and I would crash in the middle of programs. I took both sticks out and replaced them with PC100 SDRAM and it was fine. This sound very strange since they are supposed to work togather at the lowest cycle, but well it did not work for the specific computer.

both my memory sticks are pc133. anyway i dont think the ram was the problem, at least not for me. i took the thing to the place where i got it from and they charged me some money to tell me the motherboard and the cpu were conflicting; either that or it was a problem with my software. basically they accused me of messing it up. so i said screw you and i was never seen again. no actually they replaced the motherboard and it took them 9 days but now my computer's back home again and all the old problems have disappeared. i guess i'm happy; more relieved than anything though. so this is the end of me i hope. let us never speak of this again.