I was given a computer with issues today from a friend who said the pc started acting up and would only run Ms-dos. It is a 550 mhz pc and she said it was bought from CompUSA some years ago. It has 64 megs ram/50x cdrom drive and sound card. I tried to install Windows ME on it and it installed until it got to the part where Windows initializes it's driver data base to install drivers and it locked up. I rebooted and it got to that part again and it locked up, so I reformatted and tried to install Window 98 and it locked up during setup. I typed the setup/? and used those switched but it still locked up. I fdisked/formatted and tried to install Windows 95A, it installed totally & when it rebooted the computer it locked up. Can someone help me as I would hate to run Dos on this pc when (if it was fixed) capable of running another OS.

Possible causes of lock-ups (other than corrupt OS which you already seemed to have ruled out): 1. Bad memory 2. Power Supply going bad, overheating, whatever. Just because the fan starts and Windows begins to load, does not necessarily mean it is operating within specifications. 3. Overheating A. CPU B. Chipset C. Hard drive 4. Bad CPU

Doc memory tester

did you open the box up & clear it of dust? If the case has never been opened before, I'm sure it could use a good cleaning - especially the heatsink & CPU cooling fan. While you have it open, double check that all the cards, cables & RAM are fully seated in their slots. You may wanna fire it up with the cover off to confirm the CPU fan is working properly. If that doesn't help, start with a memory tester as recommended by ham30 Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @8x210mhz 512mb PC3200 Ti4200/8X 128mb WDC 60GB

Well I figured out what the problem was. I went into the cmos and disabled everything I could and rebooted and Windows 98 installed fine with no lockups. I then started enabling things in the cmos one by one until the machine locked up to see where the problem was. Anyway, when I enabled com2 and rebooted the machine immediately locked up, I disabled com2 and the machine booted fine. Afterwards I did give the pc a good cleaning and it was full of dust.