Hi guys! I've been posting this same problem for a little while now and got some good answer and some not so, but none of them seems to have solved my problem. I think I've give it another shot and explain to you some details to my freezing problem. First off, my initial thought on the problem was that it could be of overheating. Well, although I did not go out and buy some extra fans to put into my system, I did download a program which monitors my system temperature and it reads a cool 40 degrees. What really told me that it wasn't overheating was that I moved my computer to right next to the air conditioner and still Windows froze. Another incident was the computer in a normal room(w/o air cond.) and it froze like always but i happen to have my temperature prog on and it shows the computer at 35. I also doubt it was the memory/ram because I had them replaced to no luck comp still froze. As with the graphic card also, that too was changed. When I bought the computer it came with Windows 2000 which from the start it always froze. So I changed to Win98 which has the same result. So it couldn't be the OS. I also tried msconfig and turned off startup item that were not necessary. Same. I can't say its any program in particular that the freezing happens. I use the internet most of the time the computer's on so it's on IE that I get the most freezes. But the computer has froze on me with Winamp, Netscape(installed thinking it was IE problem), Paint Shop Pro, and even while using Windows Explorer. I don't have a virus. However, I have noticed that once it freezes, most of the time if all I did was reboot the computer instead of turning it off and waiting a few seconds, Windows won't start and I can't go to my desktop as it wold just sit at the Windows 98 frozen. Sometime I get the safe mode option screen. And also many times, when I just reboot and do get to my desktop it would freeze right away at the beginning so it sit frozen at my desktop before I can even move my mouse. Sometimes I can move it and only 2-3 seconds later it would freeze. These happen when I just reboot instead of turning it off and giving the computer break. I also noticed when it freezes sometimes I see a pinkish thin line running horizontally thru somepart of the monitor. And when I'm on the internet and scrolling down a page when just happen to freezes, the screen freezes with a weird look where most of the page is normal looking while a small bottom portion is of the same page but not where it should be where I was suppose to scroll. During all freezes everything is frozen even the mouse cursor. I think that's all I can desrcibe right now that I can think of from the top of my head. My system info is below, help would be so greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance! Windows 98 Athlon 1800+ 512mb SDRAM GeForce2 MX PCChips 830 motherboard with sound and ethenet card

Thought I should add in that the computer freezes at diffrent point in time. When coming from a fresh start(turn on after hours of being off), sometime it would freeze minutes, sometimes half hour, very few makes it to an hour or beyond. I'd like to say though that it does not freeze if I leave it running without doing anything, but thats from blurred memory as I don't know if thats true all or most of the time. Just thought of another...the computer also freezes while I leave the computer to burn some cds too SOMETIMES. Thanks again in advance for any help!

I wouldn't totally rule out overheating. You said that your system temperature was 40 degrees. I'm assuming you dont mean cpu temperature. Your cpu temperature could be a lot higher. Moving your computer next to the airconditioner might not have much of an effect on your cpu temperatue. I would check that the fan on your cpu is working ok and also that it is not full of dust. Freezes can be a bugger to fix as they can be caused by so many thinks. It could be software or hardware. Cant remember your first post so this may have been covered.... First I would boot to safe mode. If this fixes it I would say it was a device conflict, a driver problem, or a vxd problem. A clean install of windows and nothing else would be my next step (just your vid card ,hard drive,1 stick of ram, and floppy, nothing else installed). This would rule out the operating system and your video card. Then start adding stuff back until you recreate the problem or hopefully have a nice stable system. If it's a hardware problem this will be a pain to find and beyond my level of expertise. I just swap parts out for known working parts. Handy if you have them. If your motherboard is shakey then aouch. Another thing worth trying, probably before a clean install, have you got some old dos progs you can play with ? See if the comp freezes in DOS first(true dos mode, not dos window).If it doesn't then you could probably assume it's not a hardware fault. (not sure if this would rule out hardware not used by dos, probably not). Just thought of something else which should perhaps be the first step. Reset you bios to 'failsafe defaults' or whatever the conservative setting mode is for your computer. It would pay to write down your setting first so you can change them back. I'm also assuming you aren't overclocking anything, this can cause instability problems. This could go on forever so in brief.. 1) update all your drivers. (I just fixed a freeze problem caused by a memory leak when playing movies by updating my gforce2 mx drivers from 4.13 to latest drivers) 2) try in safe mode 3) try in dos mode 4) set bios to failsafe defaults 5) reinstall windows. 6) Isolate your hardware by removing the adding back. 7)long shot, but limit vcache to below 512MB. You have 512MB ram which is the max allowed before you should limit vcache in system.ini to below 512MB. It should be ok but if you have a large AGP aperture size (MB's of RAM allocated to AGP video card) this could tip the balance.I'm not 100% on this one but limiting vcache wont hurt. 8) Dont follow what I say blindly, I'm no computer technician but have built a few machines and fixed a few problems. Good luck, sounds like you got a lemon.(was it second hand ?)

Hi Tony, Download a diagnostic program on Floppy from the manfufacture's Site for your HDD and run that. Most hard disk makers have one. It maybe stopping to read the same sector over and over. then when it freezes the Computer cannot report it. All you will get when you boot up again is, Scandisk trying to run. Then that will probably freeze. Give it a try, at least that will eliminate your hard Drive Edward.

Hi Tony, I had the EXACT problem with my brand new Athlon when I bought it. For months I was slinging more fans, faster fans to bring the temperature down but the freezes were random. I tried pulling all the bits out and slowly adding them all back in again, but the problem remained. To cut a long story short, it was the bios. The motherboard was brand new, just released new in fact and I frequently visited the manufacturer site which in my case was Asus. I think it was like the 2nd or 3rd release of bios updates that fixed the problem. Since then my machine has never crashed, apart from running Maya, Max and a game... Just asking for trouble that. But the freezing vanished once the latest bios went in! I hope this helps. Your machine should run long enough to update your bios from Windows. It takes seconds. I checked your motherboard model, the manufacturer site with updater and rom is here: http://www.pcchips.com.tw/BIOS.html Goodluck!