clueless_furball

I'm pretty sure the video card isnt overheating (no dust in there really) and well, Id imagine the lock-ups would happen more often. Since it seems really finicky what videos it'll lock up on. Or it'll lockup over and over and over and then behave for awhile and then randomly lock up without warning. I mean, if it really was the video card overheating, it wouldve done it with XP. When it was running XP it would hum a long. without a problem. I actually read about this issue (out of interest since I like this stuff) And well, it's not ussually apparent, but 98 SE uses a totally different GDI system than XP. The XP one allows for things like Flash to run properly to summerize, because there's some kind of hardware interaction thing that works differently. That probably why if I want to lock up my system just for kicks, all I have to do is press the HQ button on a Youtube video. It freaks out Windows 98, because Windows 98 just doesnt know what to do. I blame Adobe. They are probably aware of the 'bug' but they dont care for fixing it for 98 users... Well, because supposidly no one uses 98 I guess . No sticker with numbers on my PC. It's a Pentium 3 beige box, bought from a friend.

This is just a stab in the dark. But have you tried running the Nokia Suite using Kernal Ex? Possibly if you did that, the Nokia Suite would act as if it where on a Windows XP system and use the DLL's to interact with your Nokia cell phone. By what I've read, KernalEx can run a handful of software applications intended for XP. Just maybe if you're lucky it'll run the Nokia Suite and do what you need. If you feel like it, you could email the people who wrote KernalEx. I think they might want to give it a try making it run.

This PC had a legit copy of Windows XP (Though the hard drive it resided on pooped out) I dont have the CD for it, but I did have a Windows 98 SE CD lieing around. As for Vista, this computer is way too slow. The only thing in it the meets the minimum requirements is the CPU. I'm waiting until Vista matures and Microsoft combs out the really bad security holes/stability issues and then when that happens I'll build a PC meeting the recomended requirements. I've helped people out with their Windows Vista computers. Windows Vista does some pretty weird things. I'm pretty sure the computer has no viruses. I think those third party patches I installed made Windows 2k freak out to be honest. That and the second time I think it caused stability issues with Windows 98 se being on the same drive (Which had nothing to do with the third party patches, just the different things mightve confused things) And I looked on newegg, but I just saw copies of Windows XP intended for a classroom ($200-300 CDN) Which is just nuts, since I dont need a classroom license. Just for my home PC. Again, thanks for your help. I think there's no point trying to fix that thing for now.

I kind of figured as much. Though I tried selecting the upgrade option first. But it kept going around in circles. It would try installing the hardware over and over and then freeze at a blank desktop or it would say it was installing network drivers and then reboot itself when it was trying to install something called "transaction controller". It also said one time it tried that a system file was missing("the ordinal 20 not found DRMClien.dll"). I booted in with a bootdisk looking for that dll, and the dll was there, which was kind of strange since one pass when setup was reseted it said that one wasnt there. It kept on doing it and then I tried just installing a clean install. (it comes up with a prompt every time I boot my PC asking me to pick either windows 2000 or "Microsoft Windows"(which is the Windows 98 SE installation). Okay, so I guess I should do what you suggested and remove Windows 98 SE and format the HD as NTFS and install Windows 2k once again. Thanks for your help (I normally dont try to dual boot Windows, since I ussually just stick to one of them)

Well, I started using Opera and it worked great, for awhile anyways. Though the lockups still keep happening even if I do reboot often (I looked up 98 GDI and discovered the limit on 98 is very low compared to 2k and XP, so I thought rebooting and clearing those resources would help) So I thought maybe Flash 9 just isnt intended for Windows 98 SE, so If Id like to use it I'll have to upgrade to a newer version of Windows. I guess TinyFirewall might be screwing something up or it may be my video card driver. Though my video card is quite old and I have the newest possible version of the driver for 98. I totally stopped using MSN 7.5. So it's not doing it (buggy POS it is). I'm pretty sure mysterious lockups are Flash's fault. But sometimes it does it on a normal php forum. These things never happened to me on XP and if I had a legit XP CD, Id be using that right now because I didnt have problems like that on it. Just M$ stopped selling XP, and even if I had the money for a new computer I wouldnt want to tolerate Vista. So I'm kind of stuck with old Windows. (I'm going to have to upgrade to Vista eventually as my course work requires me to use it.... bliiag)

I recently tried to install Windows 2000. I ran the instalation from Windows 98 SE. I asked it to do a clean install of Windows 2000 (Since I wasnt sure if Windows 2000 had drivers for my ethernet adapter so I thought I might need that later). I also left the file system as FAT32. I ran the instalation from the hard drive since 98 kept on locking up on the CD-ROM. Anyways, the instalation whent fine. It recognized things like my sound card. But it didnt recognize my video. Well that was okay. Id get that later. But almost every icon I clicked on it would crash the system. (including the one for my video card drivers). It would either lock up cold requiring a hard reset. I couldnt get anything to run. So the question is, should I really be running Windows 2k on the same parition as Windows 98? Should I run the thing with NTFS instead of FAT32? I didnt really think the filesystem had any bearing on this since I ran Windows XP Home fine with FAT32 and it didnt really act any different than one with NTFS. Though Windows 2k might be different as it is a older version of Windows.

Thanks for your help, everyone. I think I isolated the problem. Firefox2/Flash were eating GDI resources like crazy. So I just use Opera and reboot every couple hours and turn my PC off when I'm not using it. I used Opera a long long time ago and it sucked, though it seems to work okay with this computer.

When I browse the internet I use Firefox 2. I know it's not a memory problem(I had Windows XP on this machine and it worked fine) I have all the unofficial updates (Including Flash 9). I dont trust Internet Explorer at all, so on my computer I have my firewall set to not allow it to communicate in or out. The lockups have been happening ever since I installed Windows 98 SE in the first place (It did the same thing too the last time I installed it). I have 576 mb of SD-RAM. So, Windows 98 might have a problem with that. Though I dont see why... The lockups ussually occur most often when Firefox is open, most often when viewing things using an Flash plugin (things like youtube or a app with Flash) There's nothing running on my machine that could cause a problem. I use tiny personal firewall and occasionly I use MSN 7.5. So I'm really kind of confused. It ussually just locks up to the point the mouse operates but nothing on the screen will respond to mouse clicks or key presses. Sometimes the screen will go blank or have giberish on the top portion of the screen and black for the rest and the monitor will go in idle mode as if the monitor is no longer recieving input from the VGA port. The weird black screen crash doesnt happen as much as the frozen cold solid screen. I never see BSODs. In fact the whole time I used Windows 98 (mostly years ago) I rarely seen BSODs if at all. That's why I always never really understood people when they said they saw them because I probably saw them like once a year.

My Windows 98 SE computer keeps locking up so bad, that I have to reset it. It never blue screens, just the screen freezes and I can move the mouse, but nothing I click on will respond. It seems to happen most frequently when there's something on the screen using the flash plugin, or animated gifs on the screen. It's really weird, since I never had a Windows 98 SE computer behave this way (ussually they run quite solid unless they're left on too long). I have a little bit of a suspicion that someone is sending fragmented ICMP packets to my computer. Though I dont think Windows 98 has this problem. (more like Windows 95 and NT 4.0) Though this could be a possibility. I thought the patches fixed all of that. Though, I suppose Flash is doing something Windows 98 doesnt like.

Well, I dont know exacly what to write. I came here when I was looking for service packs for Windows 98 SE. And reading the posts, I think this would be a okay forum to post on (Even though most of the time I had my account on here, I didnt post out of fear of accidently spamming).