Any help with this problem would be a great help. i cant sleep at nights. 650 megahertz AMD Athlon, Board: 8371-686A -Bus Clock: 100 megahertz. 64 Megabytes Installed Memory. My PC has been freezing for over a year now and i have worked out that flash is the culprit. When my PC views or uses flash, it freezes for anywhere between 10 seconds to 30 seconds every 5 to 10 mins (sometimes less). In the past it used to be that if i stopped viewing these flash sites or using it, then the problem would persist and i would have to restart the machine to get rid of the freezing.. but this is no longer the case. Now, if i stop using or viewing flash, the system returns to normal. I have reinstalled flash but the problem didnt go away. does anyone have any other ideas? The problem also occurs when i use Flash MX and Dreamweaver, which makes working impossible. I need to sort the problem out. I have been told that this problem could be due to 15/17 dead condensators. Could this be right? any help would be welcome, cheers

hello there were some problems posted about bad condesors a while back in hard ware forum.useally they quit and mother board dies. some times they exploded.your still running so unless you smeld something burnt ect its not likely. but one problem i do see is only 64 megs of ram. and since all programs run in ram and you start a ram intencive one you could freeze. i would add anther 256megs of ram or what ever your mobo suports upto 512megs. and try the things in this link how to run m.e well verion 5 http://www.burzurq.com/forum/trevtweak.html

Have you considered adding more Memory? 64Mb is too small to run Windows ME well, especially when running applications that use Flash. The disk drive gets thrashed too much using the virtual memory swap file. You really need at least 64Mb more and adding 128Mb would make the system run Windows ME/IE a lot better. However, the "every 5 to 10 minutes" thing sounds more like either the Automatic Windows/IE update hang problem due to corrupted files or the System Restore slowdown due to corrupted restore files. Or one of the problems with the Networking software being configured wrong, and looking for shared devices. If you don't have a local LAN, make sure there are no local devices defined in the My Network Places. Would suggest you work through my ME Fixes and make most of the changes and see which ones help the most. Removing PCHealth and TaskMonitor if not already done will free up a little memory space. You might also want to take a close look at your other startup programs and remove any applications that start at startup that you really don't need. I also assume you have used Disk CleanUp utility in System Tools, to select the "Downloaded Program Files", click View button, and manually removed all "objects" used as plugins, incase one is backlevel.

cheers guys, i know the 64Mb thing is a problem, im going to spend a week soon sorting the whole system out. i'll start with that. Though to be honest i have never noticed it as a problem... i use photoshop and premiere a lot and they run fine, as did flash and dreamweaver before i went on that holiday (more below) i'll get on to doing your recommendations now, but if it is of use.... My system was fine, no problems at all until i went on holiday for two weeks, and of course during this time the system wasnt touched. however during that two weeks a broadband connection was plugged into the machine, when i got back it was all plugged in and ready to run. When i switched the PC on, the problem started from then. -i dont know if thats any indication to what the exact problem with flash could be. i'll run through the ME fixes now, cheers. but the point raised "Networking software being configured wrong". I never used my Networking but when the broadband connection was set up it just automatically kicked in at startup. I just press cancel and never paid attention to it (which is probably asking for a problem no?). It never seemed to make a difference to anything, so I just left it. I dont know anything about it to be honest.. anything i should be looking for?

Learn how to use the System Configuration Utility ,to remove un-needed apps from loading at startup. Also defintly increase your RAM ,256M.B. seems to be the optimal amount in Windows Me ! To open the system configuration utility , go to start /run type msconfig , when it opens click on the startup tab and see how many items are running. You can write down whats running on a list and then do a search on these items to see if they are needed at startup or not .Except for Windows Processes and your Anti-Virus app ,most of the other stuff can be eliminated from startup. In msconfig ,pick selective startup , and then remove the check marks from the items you no longer want to load and restart your PC .The frist time you start ,you will have a box open saying you are using the system config utility for selective startup , put a check mark for it to not show you that box again. After I removed items from loading on my system ,my user resources went from around 70% free to 94% free ,after bootup ! Good Luck Nick

cheers Nick, I have used the System Configuration Utility and cleaned it up.. there wasnt too much in there to give a problem, but i unchecked a few things and all is cool. Ive gone through the ME fixes but none of them seem to make much difference to anything to be honest. ME has never given me that many problems to begin with, so i might not notice. Flash still freezes my PC though, as does the "Championship manager 4 pre-game editor" which i downloaded today.... and that doesnt use flash i am sure. hmmm Flash is still the main problem i guess, but that pre-game editor freezing the PC puts a spanner in the works. I dont know what to do really. increase the memory and hope? and if the memory is not the problem?

update - problem solved. for anyone who has the same problem, as daft as it may seem, a full disk surface scan sorted my problem out. it did take about 4 hours of scanning (with a lot of error messages). But this has stopped my system freezing with Flash. Maybe it was the disk scan in combination with the ME fixes, i can not be sure, but i did do both, but the scan did the trick. right. im off to get some more memory still ;) hope that helped. thanx for the help up there guys