I have a Pentium III 733MHz with Soltek SL-65FVB mainboard, Win98SE, 128 SDRAM. One day the computer started freezing, EVERY TIME, if the system is idle (no mouse or keyboard actions) for three minutes. The only recover is a hard boot. The problem never happens in Safe Mode.

If I open applications or if the hard disks are used in normal, it does not freeze. But as soon as there are three minutes idle, it freezes without fail.

I have spent two days troubleshooting, replaced hard disk, reinstalled Windows, uninstalled and reinstalled all drivers, removed and reinserted all cards (in Windows and from the mobo), checked CPU fan, checked CPU temp (it's OK), checked memory with DocMemory 8 times, uninstalled and reinstalled the CD drives, removed video driver, reduced display colors and resolution to bare minimum.... nothing helps.

Could this be a damaged CPU? BIOS virus?

Even if I strip normal mode to bare bones, it always happens.

To follow up, I also tried disabling
power management in control panel and turned off the screen saver. I also reduced graphics acceleration to minimum. I have also done a full system scan of all files for a virus with the latest Norton Antivirus.

I don't think it's the PSU because there is never a problem in Safe Mode.

I have also replaced the original ATI graphics driver with a generic VGA driver, to no avail.

I have also placed a fan next to the open case to try to keep the system cooler, thinking it might be some overheating motherboard chip, but that didn't help.

Does Safe Mode use the same areas of the SDRAM as Normal Mode? DocMemory did not find problems in the SDRAM, but I've heard the memory diagnostic programs are not always reliable.

I finally found the solution!

First I tried disabling Video Shadow in BIOS settings, but that didn't help.

The solution was to disable the ACPI function in Power Management in CMOS setup BIOS. After I did this and rebooted, Windows 98 proceeded to install the drivers for "BIOS (fail safe)". It then re-installed the drivers for mouse, keyboard, etc. (It was extremely difficult to find and install the drivers that Win98 was looking for, but that's another story.) This even after I had already performed a complete clean install of Win98 on a brand new formatted drive.

Anyway, the freezing problem is now gone and the power management works as it did before.

This problem was very strange, because it suddenly appeared for no apparent reason, and I had never made any changes to the power managment BIOS settings prior to now. The problem just seemed to magically appear.

Weird indeed. At least you solved it and posted the solution.

Charles

PS: I had and solved a problem with 1 GB and win98se. Cause was original ATI driver on cdrom. Solution was latest ATI driver downloaded from ATI. I posted the details some time ago in the win9x forum.