We have an older HP Pavilion running Win ME on a Pentium II, 350 MHz processor. The history... Last June we loaded several games (3DO's Heroes of Might & Magic IV, and LucasArts' Galactic Battlegrounds/Clone Campaigns, and Sim Themepark) for the kids. Prior to installing the games the system was relatively stable using DirectX 7, and 128 MB Ram. The original hard drive was 7.5 GB. The games required DirectX 8.0 so we updated. These new games constantly 'crash' as well as internet explorer crashing. Older games aren't a problem. These new games abruptly stop and throw the desktop up with no error messages most of the time. The amount of time spent on the game/internet varies prior to crashing. In an effort to fix the problem over the last 6 months we've loaded all game patches, added more RAM - now up to the max the computer can have at 384 MB (2 - 128/133 and 1 - 128/100), updated the graphics drivers (a Rage Pro Turbo AGP 2x - 4MB), checked for chipset updates (Already at the most recent version), installed a second slave hard-drive (80 GB partitioned into 4 drives), installed a newer sound card (Sound Blaster 512 - driver, EMU10K1.vxd, not signed), reformatted and reinstalled the original Win 95 operating system using the HP recovery cds & upgraded to Win ME again, set & optimized the swapfile to a constant 1200 MB min/max, updated to DirectX8.1 and used other Tweaks suggested for Win ME. We've tried rebooting before playing games and closing all programs running in the background as well. The computer STILL crashes with these games/internet! We've tried using a 30-day trial of Norton Utilities to monitor the system configuration. The system can be in great condition and within a day it's crashing again. We're defragmenting almost daily now. According to the games, our computer met all the system requirements to begin with - with the exception of the DirectX version. The problem appears to be excessive data fragmentation. However, we don't know whether it's the games/internet or crashing that causes the fragmentation. We've used PCPitstop to analyze the computer as well. With the exception of the processor, the computer is in great condition - until it crashes that is. Can anyone help us get these games to work? Should we get a new graphics card? processor? switch the master and slave hard disk positions? do something with the BIOS? buy a full version of windows for a clean install? pull all the upgrades out and buy a new computer? We don't know where to go from here. Thanks!!

I don't know about everything you have or what you are using but your upgraded RAMS should work. Your pentium is good although your 350 processor is a little slow. Microsoft says it's ok but they tend to fudge on system requirements a little. It might help though if you shut down unneeded programs before you start games. Either through CONTROL ALT DELETE and or msconfig and then select the startup tab. Go to this site. http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_content.htm Scroll down to THE PROGRAMS Click FULL LIST Good luck

I believe the your problem with the games is due to the lack of mem on the Graphics accelerator , the newer games usally need more then 4mb mem to run ! My PC came with i810 intergrated graphics with the same 4MB mem ! Certain games like Quake III would barely run ! Your current graphics accelerator is also of the onboard flavor ! Since you have an older M.B. you may not have an AGP slot , my M.B. a M6TWG by Biostar did not have an AGP slot so I installed a PCI Graphics card and the differance in performance was ten fold ! You can pick up a 64MB DDR PCI card by ATI for around $60 . Its not as fast as AGP , however its still better then the onboard type you are now using !Also open the System Configuration Utility, go to run type msconfig , click on the startup tab and see whats loading at startup ? If you have to many items running in the background it can quickly degrade your performance . Set your system to selective startup , and then go to the startup tab and uncheck un-needed items you can activate on an as need basis. Also you installed a trial version of Norton Utilities . Go to Nortons web site and look for issuses with Windows Me and Norton , I have Norton Utilities 2001 installed and after I installed it I found that when running Windows Update under Windows Me errors occur with Norton System Doctor operating, most related to the Disk Health Sensor, it may create thousands of 0-byte Oem*.inf files .Go to Nortons web site to learn how to see if your system created these files and how to remove them .It took me over a 1/2 hour to delete the 0-byte Oem*.inf files from my system ! Good Luck ,Nick

We've already used msconfig to remove auto startups. Just the critical system files boot. We run everything else manually, even antivirus software. The system kept crashing prior to NU. We installed Norton Utilities in an attempt to fix whatever the problem was. The system still crashes. Our son was just playing Gallactic Battlegrounds. I had him stop playing and checked for fragmentation. For whatever reason the data files become overly fragmented during game play - PCPitstop says 16% fragmentation of data files on Drive C, NU says 1% fragmentation on Drive C. We let him continue playing and sure enough the game crashed a little while later. We checked the fragmentation again and it hadn't changed. Could a graphics problem cause such fragmentation? Wouldn't it just effect the speed of the game? PCPitstop recommend Diskkeeper for file fragmentation. Is anyone familiar with that software? The swapfile is hardly used, just 90MB of the 1200. Would having it set too high be a problem? We could try a new graphics cards I guess. We just don't want to put any more money into this computer to find out it's beyond hope.