Over night lockup (freeze) Help!

[jleites]

For the past nearly two years, I've been leaving my PC on all the time. Lately, it's been locking up first thing in the morning. For the past two mornings, I've moved the mouse to "wake up" the system, and the monitor comes on (light changes to green), but the screen is black except for kind of a line that separtes the taskbar from the rest of the screen. The system is then otherwise dead. (other times the wallpaper will display, with or without some of the icons). I then have had to boot up more than once to get it working again, it will lock up in various stages of coming up, making it a little further each time. This morning, after it made it all the way, it locked up again about a minute later. One more reboot and it was ok, and it will probably be ok as I use it intermittently throughout the day. I'm becoming more and more tempted just to buy a new machine, I'm just not looking forward to all the installs I'll have to do. Any on have an idea?

PII machine
Win 98SE
Power scheme: System Standby - Never
Turn off Monitor - After 15 minutes
Turn of Hard Disks - After 1 hour

 

[wolluf]

1. Heat? Is the processor running hot (apart from visually checking fan, there's usually a temperature monitor in the bios).

2. Its Windows 98! Windows 98 DOES degrade with time, and become more prone to freezing up etc (long time ago, but when I used 98, I used to reinstall about every 3 months!)

3. Have you tested the memory - may have started going bad - in fact any hardware item may be!

A new machine - or even a more recent second hand one - running XP would be a good idea (not Vista, for I'd say a year) - if you are happy spending the cash! I know setting it up can be a bit of a bind - but it also gives you a chance to 'spring clean' - and machine will definitely be more reliable and probably a lot faster.

 

[xit]

I know this may sound a bit off, but just a week ago I had a system that sounds a lot like yours and it turned out to be the power supply. Seems the power supply was only providing sufficent power to start the system up but not enough to keep it going smoothly.

xit

 

[jleites]

I GAVE UP!!!

It started working normallay again, then it started locking up again. Then I turned it off because I was going out of town for a few days. When I got home it froze on boot up. I opened it up, blew the dust off, removed cards and memory and cleaned the connectors. I must of not had a memory card seated right, because on boot up, it didn't find one of the memory cards, it also blew away my bios settings. I got the memory seated right, reentered all my bios settings and it would not start windows, it would only start in safe mode, I tried a few things like restoring the registry, and reinstalling windows (not a cold reinstall) twice. Each time it got to the last 5 minutes of the install and would hang up. I threw in the towel and got myself a new duo-core p/c, with XP on it so I wouldn't have to deal with Vista. It took a few days to get all my apps reinstalled, but I'm a happy camper now I was thinking of reformatting the HD on the old one, and doing a clean reinstall of 98, but I really don't have anyplace to put it if I got it working again. Besides, the speed of this new one has me spoiled.

 

[dicktttt]

jleites

I don't leave any computers on for any unattended extended length of time.

Not since I turned on my computer went to have breakfast and smelt a very acrid smell.

I went back into my living room, where I keep one computer, and black smoke was pouring out of it.

By itself, a floppy drive had shorted and was burning up the power cable. I shut the computer in time.

The power strip circuit breaker didn't flip!

Twice I have had power supplies giving off real bad electric odors. Which I changed immediately.

As to your problem, the above suggestions can certainly be a possible cause but I have found that it is usually a resident program that suddenly thinks it is needed and does an 'illeagal' operation.

Could be a bonified program but may well be virus or spyware.

What might help is to uninstall all unecessary programs, run a virus/spy program (or two) and stop most programs not needed from loading at bootup. Too many programs runing can wipe out the base memory and freeze you up.

I like System Mechanic as it get rid of junk from my computer.

The power scheme has given me touble. Try turning it of for now.

I had a cpu over heating but this takes time to freeze as it will happen when it reaches about 80 degrees C not immediately ( changed th cpu fan to a better one and problem stopped)

Dick