W98 keeps freezing

[cmulvey]

I recently built my first PC and I am having trouble with it freezing up. I changed the video cards, trying to troubleshoot, and it still froze up. I have ran scandisk and defrag. It will run the scandisk from DOS for hours, completing the scan and never freeze up, but once it is in W98 and I try to do anything, it freezes. This PC has not been connected to a LAN or WAN because I have not been able to load all my programs on it due to the constant intermittant freezing.

When it freezes, the mouse is inoperable as well as the power button on the front panel, so I am using the black power button on the back of the PC to shut it down. I have also re-formatted and re-loaded W98 twice. Any help would be appreciated, I am running out of ideas. Here is what the PC consists of:

Shuttle AK35 GT2 motherboard
Athlon XP1900+
DDR 2700 Memory 512 MB
Maxtor 30 GB HD
ChainTech nVidia Gforce4 MX440
Enlight case with 340watt PSU
Floppy
CD-RW

Thank you,
Cindy

[Budfred]

I am somewhat baffled, but here are some ideas.

Do you hold the front power button for at least 4 seconds to shut down, it may take that long?

If it is running ok in DOS, but not in Windows, I would start guessing a problem with the video. I would look to see if there is anything about using the card you have with the motherboard you have on both websites. I would also look for updated drivers. Then I would try booting to Safe Mode and see if:

1. Does it freeze.
2. How does the video driver look in Device Manager and is there more than one listed. You may also have to check specs to make sure there are no CMOS or jumper settings to change to make it work.

Oh, also, have you tried Ctrl-Alt-Delete?

Good luck,
Budfred

[cmulvey]

There is only one video driver listed in Device Manager. I tried holding down the power button on the front panel to see if that would shut it down, but once it freezes, it has no affect no matter how long I hold it in. The Ctrl-Alt-Del has no affect on it once it freezes. I tried it in safe mode as you suggested and it didn't freeze while I was running in that mode, but as soon as I rebooted to normal, it froze without even bringing W98 all the way up, it froze right before the desktop icons were put on it.

The components are all new and freshly installed. I thought it might be the video card also, so I replaced it with another one, and still had the same problem. I have checked and rechecked my connections to make sure everything is tight. Any other ideas?

[Budfred]

If it runs in Safe Mode ok, that is a pretty good clue that it is a software problem and that is better than if it were a hardware problem. You could do a series of selective startups using Diagnostic Mode and not load one driver each time to see which is causing the problem. There is probably an easier way to do this, but I am not sure what it is. You could just start by unchecking almost everything in the Startup tab of msconfig and see if it boots and runs ok. If it does, then you put back one program at a time until it fails again. Tedious, but possibly effective.

Budfred

[cmulvey]

Now your on to something, I used msconfig and used the selective startup. The first time I booted with only the config.sys checked, then I rebooted and included the system.ini. System works seems to be working great, was playing Unreal Tournament without any hangs or glitches until we entered 16 bots to test its limits, then it froze up, but that could be a whole other problem. So apparently the problem resides in the win.ini files. Do I actually need any of these to operate any part of the computer? If so what do I have to have, I am not familiar with the files?

[Budfred]

I am pretty sure that Win.ini is essential for Win98 to run, it is the initialization program for Windows. However, my knowledge is pretty limited when it comes to editing it. I am guessing that it does need to be edited, but I am not sure what it would be safe to remove. This is a link to the MS Knowledge Base which may steer you in the right direction:

http://search.support.microsoft.com/search/default.aspx

Good luck,
Budfred