Unexplained Lockups

[goodguy_98]

Hi,

I am running an Asus A7M266 mobo with a AMD 1400 CPU. My operating system is Windows 98 SE with all current windows updates installed. Every so often the system totally freezes up, the mouse won't move etc. I let it sit there for about 15 to 20 seconds and suddenly it breaks free. I can't see any rhyme or reason that I am doing at the time to cause it. I have checked my Win 98 power settings and the machine is set to "Always On". System Standby is Never, Monitor is Never and Turn off hard drives after one hour. I am used to waiting for the hard drives to restart so that doesn't seem to be the problem. I also set Windows 98 SE to allow me to manage my own virtual storage rather than letting it dynamically expand and compress the swapfile itself. I have 512 mb of DDR ram installed and set the virtual memory size to 768. There is no screensaver activated, so that's not it either. I am baffled as to where to turn next. The Asus probe utility shows CPU temps in the 51 C degree range which is no higher than normally seen. Anyone have some ideas on what to look for. It's been awhile, but I believe the power supply is 400 Watts. It was supposed to be decent quality, but I admit to ignorance on components like that. I am hoping someone can help. I also ran Symantec's virus checker included with Systemworks 2001 and it detected no errors. My virus definitions are a little dated because the subscription expired. I bought Systemsworks 2003, but they make installing a new version a big hassle. Thanks for any suggestions you may be able to offer.

TIA,

Chris

 

[Civilized]

what is the rest of your system like?...have you installed all of your board drivers? Your motherboard has an amd761 northbridge and the via686B southbridge so you will need to install the via chipset drivers-the hyperion driver i think it is called now but (do not install the agp driver that is in the 4 in one driver, you can tab off of this) and you will also need the amd drivers for the agp etc.....please try to take everything out of your system that isnt needed in order for the machine to boot especially the soundcard, modems, etc. We all know how the 686B southbridge hates soundblaster live cards ...keep us tuned

 

[goodguy_98]

Yes I did install the Via 4 in 1 drivers included with the mobo. I bypassed installing the one for AGP and installed the AMD miniport driver instead. The system did have a SB Live 5.1 sound card in PCI Slot 3, but I started having problems with it. I attempted to reload the entire system on a freshly formatted partition. Everything worked ok as near as I could tell until I tried to install the Creative software for the SB Live board. It kept looking for a device driver for PCI Input Controller and the installation locked up at times. I attempted to solve the problem with Creative support, but really got nowhere. I had reinstalled Windows 98 SE several times in the past, so I figured the card itself went bad and was out of warranty, so why continue to pursue it with them. I moved a jumper on the mobo and enabled onboard sound. It also required a BIOS setting to be enabled and onboard sound now works. I am back running on the old Win 98 SE installation and removed the SB Live stuff when I installed the onboard sound drivers. I have a ton of stuff installed on the current system and would love to keep it if at all possible. It was running for a good long time and I don't remember that problem. I did add a Genica removable drive bay to the system with a Maxtor 120 gb drive in it recently. I can't remember exactly when the problem started.

Thanks for any suggestions.