Late Breaking Information about hard locks.

[cwg01]

(Editing note: made a mistake and posted this in another forum)
I'm actually sitting here and composing some information which I discovered with my computer that I thought I'd pass along to the people here. I needs to lay down a little background information first about the all this.
I use a custom rolled 350mhz K6-2 DFI system with a mass of upgrades and overlays, and some of the programs I cannot reinstall because I've lost the install disks. Bummer.
For the past several months, I've been experiencing HARD LOCKS, you know, the ones which force you to press the RESET button, or turn the darned thing OFF?
And there was no predictable pattern to the locks, they just happen. But, the lost work was really starting to grieve me, or anger me, or something. (CTRL+S became a standard keystroke when working.)
I suspected the soundcard, mainly because a lot of the lockups were occurring when playingMP3's.
Nope.
Maybe it was the MP3 player, got the latest fully debugged version.
Nope.
Video card?
Nope.
BIOS! Yeah, that gotta be it, got the upgrade flash and mopped the sweat off the forehead while performing the flash.
Nope.
OS? Been by windowsupgrade so many times the damm site greets me by name. (Why hello cwg, what's wrong today?)
I could write a book on the number of things I've done in trying to get rid of the locks, when finally, God inspired me to do something simple, turn off fancy features.
First Day; I turned off the soundcard, rebooted, ran for three hours, LOCK.
Second Day; Changed to small fonts in preparation of switching to plain VGA drivers, ran the rest of the night without a problem, so I left it like that.
Third Day; Woke up, found the computer hard locked with defrag on the display. FYI: Running a scheduled task will restart the video system on many machines.
Ok, REBOOT.
Decided to disable the defrag in Task Scheduler and go to work.
Now here's where it gets interesting, when I got home that evening, my system standby led was lit!
Most curious, but I put it down to maybe my brother had come by and did some work with the machine and pushed the standby button. But when I asked him about it later on, he told me he didn't use the machine that day, and the bulbs started going off in my head, (blinded myself for several hours).
I then DISABLED TASK SCHEDULER and since then, I have not experienced a hard lock, and the led comes on when Windows puts the computer into standby.
And My Sound is back! (Yeah, missed my tunes.)
Well, I lie a bit, I did experience a couple of locks, but I know I did them to myself, otherwise, I have not experienced an unexpected lock.
But I had windows up and stable for seven whole days without a fault.
I'd post my latest uptime, but I've done several reconfigures of the system which require rebooting.
(p.s. info, I have a win98 machine at work which was last booted on February 14, 2001)

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turbopoweredbylynx

[summergirl]

Hello cwg01

I'd like to know specs on the win98 PC you have at work. I've been working on PC's for 3 years and have never seen a windows machine run that good. 3 days at the most--before getting illegal ops, blue screens, lost time, etc. Please tell me if you have updates, which ones, what kind of software is it running and how big a load you put on it every day. Really, I'm PC support for about 300 users and I'd like to know if there's anything I can do to make our win98 run like yours. please post back

['Eminence Grise]

Summergirl, Are you kidding? I rarely get bsod's or error messages and never lock. All of my problems come from screwing around with them. If I leave the three computers I have on a home network alone I'll go forever without a problem. I update everything and no I never use task scheduler but I recently went back to the power management function and have had zero problems. I think maybe cwg01 has something there. I run smart cleaner every friday then Langa's clean up batch file then scandisk and finally defrag. Every friday and I check updates for inoculateit and windows daily. I know I'm tempting fate when I say this because window runamucks are waiting for some jerk like me to be satisfied with everything. The only problem I've faced lately is a floppy drive goin' south on me. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I got the only bsod from that in a few months.

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My hand is steady, my eyes are cold. A voice inside my head keeps saying "Do as you are told".

[cwg01]

summergirl asks:

I'd like to know specs on the win98 PC you have at work

Oh Boy, bare minimum Win98, ie, only thing else on it is the disk tools, Explorer, and Notepad, has a sound card, network card, and two 500meg hard drives, 32megs of RAM, 486dx2-66mhz, and the only thing I use it for is sound file editing, (big files too, 22050 sample rate, 16bit, mono, up to 2 hours in size.). Now mucking with them there big ass files DO take some time to tinker with, so 9 times out of ten, I'll save it, and edit it on a faster machine on the network.

I'd like to know specs on the win98 PC you have at work

HUH? Easy, a second machine on the network is used as a Faxer InBox, Network Print Server, Text Editing Platform, and Internet Browsing, (NS4.75). It's a 66hhz Pentium, 32megs of ram, NO soundcard, modem, network card with a 1.2gig and 450meg hard drives. I mention this machine because I really don't have to reboot it, unless NS does a lock on me and I can't kill it under wintop. Then also, because it's using Winfax as the Fax program, the version I have seems to have an occasional memory leak which I can't nail down, so that's another reason I reboot it. I think I last rebooted this machine about 5 or 6 weeks ago.

I'd like to know specs on the win98 PC you have at work

WHAT? Well, there's another machine which is semistable, but that's because I intentionally did it to the machine with misc little programs to work on either the station programming, or the company website, ect. It's inherently unstable because it's a Proteva without the manufacturer's original drivers, and seeing as Proteva doesn't exist any more, well I've been eyeing a motherboad sitting on my shelf and comtemplating installing it in that machine.
ANYWAY, I've been tinkering with not only these, (there's also two machines at work which stay on all the time, but they're not windows machines, not *nx either, just plain dos.) (then there's two other on and off machines) in addition to other peoples machines and all I can tell you is that it's FM, Frigging Magic, to create a stable machine, what causes a conflict and problem in one machine, will work just fine in another, and no tech in the world on support can provide a magic bullet, just general directions, which are quite good, and sometimes DO work!
In your case, I would start keeping logbooks, real paper logbooks, a section for each machine, and indices for each user of the machine, if you're using profiles.
Then, I would go rework each machine and set it up with what you'll have to figure out to be the 'default' configuration, that way, when you have to 'talk' to any machine, you'll know exactly where in the computer you got to go to see what happened. Get TweakUI and enable Fault Logging, it'll create a file in the windows directory called faultlog.txt, and if you want, I'll send you a quick and dirty qbasic program which will take that log apart and create sublogs for each program which died. You'll be able to spot buggy software faster, it's the ones with the biggest logs!
Finally, I would reinstall windows on each machine from a single disk, then you're assured that each of your platforms are working from the same codebase.
It's a lot of work, but in the long run it will be worth it.
BTW: Clean out them tray programs, the only things in there should be the volume control, virus software, (standardize that too), firewall programs, hmmm, oh, cd-burner program! just one! you don't need more than ONE in the tray until you're burning a cd!
i.e. kill aol's, realplayer's, and other toys.
Jeesh, I think I got windy again.
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turbopoweredbylynx
(Damm typo's)
[This message has been edited by cwg01 (edited 05-04-2001).]

[This message has been edited by cwg01 (edited 05-04-2001).]

[amathis]

WOW what kind of problems are you having.. I have 5 computers networked at home with 4 running all the time. I recently shut mine down after 3 months, which is typical due to severe thunderstorm.. I have a UPS but why take the chance.

specs
fairly basic system
PII 450
win 98FE with upgrades from micrsoft.com
IE 5.01 sp1
mail watcher
hotsync for my visor
inoculateIT
zonealarm
ATI all in wonder video card (like to watch TV on the 'puter)
98 mb ram
6 gig HD
creative AWE 64 sound card
Motorola SUPRA 56K modem
basic stuff (cdrom, floppy, etc.)


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Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that amateurs built the Ark. Professionals built the Titanic.

[This message has been edited by amathis (edited 05-04-2001).]

[NeoGeek]

I have this real "hotrod" here
Win 98
96M RAM
30G HDD
celeron 533
8M AGP Video
SB Live Value!
I do alot of work with HTML, and Graphics editing (PSP will really fill up the Virtual memory), so I have to reboot some if I am using that just to flush the clipboard etc, but (Knock wood)I haven't had a lock up in about 14 months or more. Almost never turn the darn thing off.

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A)bort,R)etry,I)nfluence with a large hammer.

[cwg01]

Originally posted by NeoGeek:
I have this real "hotrod" here
(PSP will really fill up the Virtual memory), so I have to reboot some if I am using that just to flush the clipboard.

Ah, what's PSP?
Anyway, you might try a shortcut to flushing the clipboard, copy some text to it.
What a minute, Print Shop Pro?

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turbopoweredbylynx

[NeoGeek]

Paint Shop Pro. Thanks for the tip.

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A)bort,R)etry,I)nfluence with a large hammer.