(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)

------------------
turbopoweredbylynx