AWARD BIOS - Lockup - Freeze - Hangs - Which Settings cause it?

[waf2000]

My new soyo K7VTA, AMD 750 TB, 128 MB 133 MHz DIMM,
3Dfx system was hanging (freezing / Locking) and I thought
it was Windows 98 or some software or drivers.
Apparently it was the AWARD BIOS Settings.

I may have solved this problem. I had not used the BIOS
Optimal Default Settings because if the Fail-Safe settings
caused lockups, then Optimal would be worse!
Wrong!
Optimal Default Settings in BIOS have fixed the problem.
I am wondering WHICH ones (or one?) did the trick ?
Here is a comparison of the changed settings from Fail-Safe
(which caused lockups) to Optimal Settings which work - all
the other setting are the same:
AWARD BIOS

Bios Defaults >> Fail Optimal
Safe settings
Advanced BIOS Features
Virus warning En Dis
Gate A20 Option Normal Fast
HDD S.M.A.R.T. Dis En
Adv Chipset Features
PCI Maste rPipeline Req Dis En
P2C/C2P Concurrency Dis En
K7 Clk_CTL Select Def Opt
Integrated Peripherals
IDE Prefetch Mode Dis En
Primary Master UDMA Dis Auto
Primary Slave UDMA Dis Auto
Secondary Master UDMA Dis Auto
Secondary Slave UDMA Dis Auto
IDE HDD Block Mode Dis En
Power Management Setup
-Wake Up Events,
IRQ Act Monitoring,
IRQ 13 (CPU ) Dis En

Everything else is the same, except the
Optimal Defs stop the locking up !

Can someone explain which one(s) were
likely to be causing the lockup? waf2000 - Retired PhD Biochemist.
UC Davis 1973 Biochem & Biophysics.
Bayer Corp., Pharma Div 22 years.

 

[jgoodman00]

from my experience, most hangs like you have documented are caused by memory or cpu/cache mis-configurations. whilst you haven't showed any of the memory settings, it could well be something you have listed (such as the UDMA) trigerring a misconfig with your ram or cpu. i would never use the failsafe option anyway, because it will marr performance significantly.... James Goodman
j.goodman00@btinternet.com