Hello,

I bought and built my own system in Aug 1999. It worked like a dream for three months. Then, sometime around the Adobe Photoshop 4.0 install and Windows 98 SE update (the special $12 offer), I started to have lockups.

The mouse will freeze on the screen, no commands will be taken from either the mouse or the keyboard, and my modem hangs up after a few minutes. No solution, not even Ctrl-Alt-Del. I have to do a hard reboot to get the computer to working again.

I have the following system:
Celeron 433
Asus P2B-F motherboard
2x 128 MB PC100 RAM (256 total)
Buslogic SCSI cards - one SCSI-UW for the two Seagate hard drives, one SCSI-N for everything else
Matrox Mill G200 w/16 MB RAM
3Com/US Robotics 56K Modem (ISA, not Winmodem)
Logitech mouse and keyboard
HP Officejet 630

The freezes are almost random, but certain activities increase the chance of a lockup:

-printing: 90% chance. If I spool after the job is processed, turn off all color and only print one page at a time, I can lower this to 25%. The printer does not recieve the entire job, it stops a few seconds after the freeze occurs.

- using the modem (Netscape Comm 4.5 for e-mail, Agent 1.6 for newsgroups). I took out 3Com's Modem Manager because it seemed to increase the chance of a freeze. It seems to be about 50% per hour, and gets worse if I am doing anything graphical.

I do not think this is a hardware problem, because I have updated the drivers. The freezes just happen. I am ready to blame Windows 98 SE (the special update), and do a clean install, but I hate to lose all the hard drive locations for my programs.

Any recommendations?

Jeremy Pace
Technoknight
jhp1@interpath.com

jeremy,
if you are familiar with "msconfig" then it may help you. on your start menu select "run". type in "msconfig". this will open a program that you can select and turn off start up programs. you'll see the ways to do this on the menu tabs. turn off all of your start up programs to start with. then one by one, after reboot (each item - does take time, but may isolate your problem program) reinstall each start up item until you start seeing the problems reoccur. this may help dteremine which program (s) are causing the problem. this "msconfig" has worked for me many times with win 98se problems. im running smooth now with a similar system. you can also monitor win.ini files and sys.ini fles from here. more than likely its something running in the background from startup. hope this helps you. good luck.

by the way, this will not hurt anything as you can reload the programs anytime from the msconfig program. try it.

steve

Dear Jeremy:

I am sure you are aware of Norton Utilities. Why don't you get a copy and try using this? Also, Norton Clean Sweep helps a lot too. It has a tremendous Registry checker. I would also recommend going to Windows 98 Update page and downloading all the recent fixes...especially the shut down fix for Win 98SE.

I have seen these kind of problems before, and I have usually found that it was one piece of offending hardware or software that caused it all.

1). If it was hardware, it usually comes down to an IRQ conflict or the device being put onto an IRQ that wasn't so hot. Fix - Uninstall and re-install the device.

2). If it is software, its usually because it is in conflict with another piece of software that is running at the same time and trying to do similar activities, call the same dll's, or in some manner is interrupting what something else is doing.
Or, it is broken links, bad Active X's or mis-matched registry references which are at the basis of the problem.

That is why I recommend using Norton, to get into the system and do a thorough checkup, and see if there are a lot of broken links and mis-matched registry entries. Not only can these slow the system down, but quite often they can cause the freeze ups you have mentioned.

I would also check to see what is loading up on startup. You may try a different order or remove some things, perhaps which are conflicting. I also remove as many icons from my desktop as possible, not only reducing clutter, but reducing the overhead on bootup. It seems these days that when you install anything on a computer, they want to put 3 icons on your desktop and load up your system tray. I have found that efficiency increases by deleting these icons off my desktop and just make sure that the references appear in my normal Start Programs menu. I am sure you defrag your hard disk, so I need not mention that one to you. Try these suggestions out and see if they don't help out.

Something that may be useful to you later on...Win98SE and Netscape do not function happily together. Oooooh, Logitech mouse and keyboard? VXD error there. Goto My computer, right click, properties, Device manager, click on the driver details for your keyboard and for your mouse. You'll notice that the drivers are listed in the window. But you may see something in brackets (). This is the file that windows is having a prob with. You need to extract that file from the win98SE cab - usually 54 - into c:\windows\system and c:\windows\system\vmm32

It is known that logitech and windows have a prob. You can do the same test on all the devices for your pc. You may find for your display adapter a (VDD) and/or (VFLATD) conflict as well. For your modem you may get (VCOMM) and another one is (CONFIGIMG).

i would use the win98 system information tool. under tools, file checker. this will correct any issues of ps4 replacing dlls for you.

are your RAM sticks seated properly? that was my problem once!

I'm work at goodwill

Windows 98 lockup freeze hang

play games Lockup

How about a real answer.

Adobe Photoshop 5.x replaces a file iconlib.dll in Windows 98 SE. This causes the freeze when Windows accesses this file. No fun. Extract the file from the cabs (i'm not going to explain that one) and all should be well.