i know there are certain GOOD reasons for a pc to freeze, HEAT most of all and CONFLICT in hardware, software probs, virus, bad sector etc but i know its not with HEAT or CONFLICTS as in my case, as it freezes just at startup(when i click my username, desktop loads, i move my mouse and there you go) i had some bad sectors in C DRIVE, where my win98 is, but in DRIVE D with XP, it has no bad sectors, so i dont think it tires to write or read bad sectors and get freeze. i also used (chkdsk D: /F) so that it neglects those sectors from being read, and most importantly, if it does nt get froze in 5 mins, it will work fine for a long time. i have no new hardwares, no new software installed, what should i do, i thought its with XP only, but same thing happens with 98. please help :(( Paradise lost when paradise is found

Hey, I am not an expert, but tell me does explorer start ? If not, press ctrl+alt+delete (this shows task manager). Then press file - > new proccess and type "explorer". Tell me if it helps.

I have had similar experiences in the past, however these were caused from the following: In Win98: mouse IRQ conflict (changed IRQ) In XP: program conflict (system restore) You say no new changes to hardware / software but you did mention bad sectors on the hard drive - may indicate hard drive failing? Intermittent problems are sometimes tricky to diagnose! Try starting up in safe mode (F8) in both OS see if the problem reoccurs? If not you may have a troublesome driver. Is your system virus free? Sorry can't offer you any concrete advice.. anyone else able to help?

Good morning; a tad beyond my level of experience, but is anything showing up in your "event viewer"? A good Labor Day to all; take care.. ~Tommyo

Have a look at your jumper settings, look in bios incase you have changed settings such as the way pc acceses data from the hard disk, dissable things likeshadow bios, If your running a older Via chip set mother board Downlod the via 4in1drivers, In my oppinion its sounds like your using a amd cpu via chip set mother board. and a geforce gfx card, This will cause system to fail with older via boards as they cannot handle 3d now Or the new way the geforce sereize rendered gfx, Having said this there is also nother possibilaty. It also sounds like you are over clocking your cpu or ram. u shouldnt over clock your cpu it will burn out, and as for your ram check your pc's fsb (front side bus) This is the max speed your ram an be i.e fsb 100 = pc100 ram fsb 133 = pc133 ram. having said this a pc with a fsb of 133 can run pc 100 ram Given that you state in bios that the ram speed is 100, but you cannot combine pc 100 and pc133 ram no matter what you do in bios, if you set bios to run ram at 100 the pc 133 will encounter errors and will crash pc, alternativly if you set it to 133 the pc 100 will cause the same error, The latter sudjestion Is most likely to be correct i feel. But all of the above could cause the problem, so chk ya ram/jumpers/run your pc with 1 drive at a time, Dissable video shadow and other stuff like so, You could do well to download spy bot or pest patroll (pestpatrol is the better prog) and Defrag your pc montly This should fix ya prob, hope i helped ShambleS

oh and set pnp os installed to yes. in your bios

THANKS ALOT guys, i guess it was IRQ problem thanks for your help, i did not overclocked my processor, and did not also change my BIOS settings, v.shadow is also disabled. and well if it was for the agp card, then it cud have happened earlier, like now it is working fine again . i guess it was an IRQ problem, i uninstalled my PCI slot hardwares changed the slots and reinstalled the drivers, it helped till now. im not that expert to change IRQs manually. and same goes for bios jumpers. but ill try the via driver thing, as my motherboard has via chipset. thanks alot for your time and help i really appreciate your kind concern. sifte Paradise lost when paradise is found