computer. Athlon 1Ghz, Creative Labs Sound Blaster Player 5.1 Sound card. Abit KT7 Athlon Socket A Motherboard. 32Mb ATI Xpert 2000 AGP TV-Out Graphics Card. Etc. etc. Problem. Computer locks up at random times for no reason. CPU Fan runs OK. Software (wind 98) reloaded, but same problem. Even moved the Sound card to another PCI slot. Any ideas would be appreciated. Please mail me. Can only stay on line a short time (locks up).

run msconfig in general tab, choose "selective startup". check the top three boxes, leaving the others unchecked. in start-up tab, "only check" ScanRegistry, SystemTray, and "Statemgr" if you have one. Save this, and it should fix it.

I just had the exact same thing happening to me. Just locks up. Mouse disapears, status bar stops(netscape)and it just freezes. Can't even do a cont+alt+del. Have to manually restart it. Sometimes last a few minutes, sometimes a whole hour, but locks up again. Tried it all. Reinstalled windows98Se and FE both. No good. Tried knocking it down to bare minimum like in above post, still nothing. Finally decided only way out was a full format. Took 3 hours to pull data off drive onto floppies. Can't wait till I get a cd-rw. But formatted it, and made 2 partitions this time, O/S, programs on one, and data on other. Have been back online for an hour and a half now(bare minimum running/need to download all my stuff again)but in the hour and a half it has not frozen once. So And ya, I tried the other stuff too, thought it was my video card, so moved that and reinstalled and all. Even thought it was my ram, so yanked that and reseated it too. But formatting did the trick. Well for now anyway, have to wait and see how it holds up under the rest of the families torture. Anyway good luck. But thought if you heard what I went through might give you a litte more insight into your problem. Terri

The old ATI problem. If you are running 32bpp color, change it to 16bpp and see if you still lock up online. Usually it only locks up on certain websites. Those sites load in 16bpp and ATI cards default to 32bp color on their own and can't handle it. Terri, if you have an ATI card try the same as above. IF you install ATI's newest drivers, it'll solve the online hangups, BUT might cause a cold boot failure as starting the pc after being off an hour or overnight with no power to the motherboard. If you get that problem, you're forced to start in safe mode. After it loads in safe mode, restart and the pc should reboot or restart all day long without the boot problem as long as the pc is plugged into an outlet. If you get the newest ATI drivers, you might have to also install DirecX-8 which will add to the problems. Can't uninstall DirecX without a format and reinstalling the system. (you can uninstall DX without a format but it's more work). The lockups don't happen with ATI's 3D Charger IIC AGP card, but will with their Xpert 128 AGP, don't know about the others. It also happens when running IE5 or 5.5 and the Xpert card but. It doesn't happen when I run Netscape, any version before the last two newest ones.

I am having similar problems with an ATI Rage 128 Ultra ("powered by ati") video card. The system will either lock up or the monitor shuts down. It only works when I uninstall the software and drivers and run in basic VGA mode. I have new athlon xp 1700 on an ECS K7S5A motherboard with 512M DDR memory. I have reloaded windows several times now and don't want to do it again. Any advice to solve my problem?