Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder.

Anyone out there remember the happy days of Windows 98 SE?

Those of us who work on games with a PC version are still living in them:-)

Seen this sort of thing before?

More often than I care to remember:-)

If you go to Settings \ Control Panel \ System \ Device Manager, does anything have a red cross, yellow exclamation, or other strangely coloured appeal for help attached to it?

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Not when I look at it in Safe Mode, no problems. I can't look at it in ordinary mode because of the abovementioned freezing.

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Ah. I was hoping a minute might be long enough.

In that case the bext option is probably to go through the boot option tests to see if any particular device or driver has gone bad. There's documentation on this at http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q188867 - you can start with the "Windows 98 Starts in Safe Mode" section about halfway down.

By the way, have you (or T) installed anything on T's computer recently?

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PS: "Bext" is my Neologism Of The Day - an exciting combination of "best" and "next", a brand new word optimised for the high speed lifestyle of the 21st Century digerati.

Ahem.

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It's a minute if you don't do anything -- but immediate if you do!

Thanks for the link, I'll work through that. I'll also ask her if any new kit etc...

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Hmm, an intriguing update on this: with all the stuff turned off as described below, you can now do quite a bit on it, but it seems that it freezes when it's called upon to display warning or error dialogs.

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Hmm. Possibly a display card problem. You could try:

1) Set the video card to VGA (basic functionality only) from safe mode. If this fixes it in normal mode, try reinstalling the video driver.

2) Unplugging the video card and plugging it back in.

Good luck! :-)

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Turns out to have been a hardware problem, fixed at least for now by removing and reseating everything... the startup behaviour was a bit of a red herring!

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secondhand-rick.livejournal.com

but freezes within about a minute of finishing populating the desktop.

Are you able to do anything in that 'about a minute'?

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No alas, if you try and do anything it reduces sharply to zero.

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wimble.livejournal.com

F8 as it's booting windows, and you get prompted for the various lines in autoexec.bat and config.sys?

You also get prompted for assorted other things that I never understood, so always said yes to.

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One of my machines (Scary-II) still runs 98-SE due to my no pirated software policy combines with a refusal to buy Microsoft's overpriced cr*p any more than is absolutely necessary.

As

mr_snips implies, this kind of symptom is almost always caused by a device driver failing or locking up. The steps I follow to deal with this are:

1) Ask myself whether I have recently changed any aspect of the system configuration, including installing new software or hardware or using something which was previously unused. If so, that's the cause 99% of the time.
2) Check whether any of the disks or partitions are more than 80% full. If so, clean out some junk until they're not, then defrag.
3) Unplug all USB, parallel and serial devices and remove all CDs, then try booting again.
4) Scan for virusses. Note that I don't run a virus checker by default since I find defences at point of entry far more effective. If you already run a virus checker, try switching it off for one boot and see if that helps.
5) Check the Task Manager after boot to see what's running and whether anything is grabbing vast amounts of CPU or memory.
6) If still no progress, fall back on F8 as

wimble recommends. Be warned that stepping through the whole thing is quite technical and about as much fun as watching paint dry.

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Mm, good checklist.

1) I haven't, and T says she hasn't.
2) Only half full, and have defragged.
3) Done that.
4) Her definitions are a few months out of date, but its clean as far as they go. Unfortunately I have no way of updating them as when in safe mode, or when booted from floppy, it can't go online or read them from a CD. I suppose I'll have to copy them across on several floppies... if I can find that many working floppies! Oh, I wonder if I have a bootable CD, presumably that would be OK, I'll have a look.
5) I did manage to fire up the system monitor before it froze, but it was reporting flat memory usage and plenty free.
6) I've now established that even when disabling the entirety of config.sys, autoexec.bat, win.ini, system.ini and the startup group, the error is still present. Yet it isn't present in safe mode. I find this kind of baffling... next thing I'll try is disabling all the devices in Device Manager, although I don't know if that is really any different from disabling the ini files.

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Next thing I'd check is hardware failure. In order of most to least likely:

1) Hard drive is failing.
2) One or more memory chips are failing.
3) Motherboard is failing.
4) A PCI or AGP card is loose or faulty.

After booting in not-safe mode, try downgrading the screen resolution to something really rubbish (lowest available preferably) and see if that prevents the crash.

Try getting hold of a bootable Linux CD for something like Knoppix. Start lots and lots of apps under Linux and see if that crashes it.

If the former test does still crash but the latter does not then you've probably ruled out hardware as a cause. (And if not, you then face the tricky task of working out which hardware is failing.)

If the hardware's OK, you have a really odd Windows problem. If you get that far, reinstalling Windows and all software (after backing up your data, obviously) may be your only option.

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Heh -- I took out and reseated the SIMMs and PCI cards, and unplugged and replugged the drives, and the problem has now gone away.

I think I'll give the memory a proper test just in case...

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Good plan.

Ugh - I hate vanishing bugs.

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Mm! I've got some spare SIMMs of the right size and vintage from one of my old PCs, so if there is a flaw it'll be easy to replace at least. Thanks for your help!

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Good luck !

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bibliogirl.livejournal.com

Knoppix also works wonderfully for getting stuff off elderly Windows PCs when the network card drops dead and they don't have (functional) USB so can't use a CD writer. I speak from experience. (Memo to self: you said you were going to sort your dad out with a new computer sometime soon.)

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