I am sure this has come up before, but a search yielded nothing…
In the last few weeks I have been getting the “illegal operation” message, which boots me offline, and the occasional Blue Screen Of Death. What causes this, and is there any way I can fix it?
(Windows 95, AOL 4.0)
Thanks!
You might try upgrading to AOL 5.0 or 6.0. They’re much more stable. I had lots of trouble with 5.0, but relatively little with 6.0, but I’m not sure that 6.0 can be run under Windows 95.
Other than that, there’s not much that can be done.
A BSOD can be caused by:
A bug in a program or a driver
A corrupt copy of a program, driver or data on disk
A hardware flaw in the CPU, memory or some other chip, either during manufacture or a break due to expansion and contraction as the part heats and cools when you turn the machine on and off
A chip or memory board or peripheral card has worked itself slightly loose due to temp changes.
Some combination of the above
Number 4 above is fairly easy to take care of. Just open your machine and reseat everything. If you haven’t fiddled with your machine’s innards get a friend who has to show you. It’s really very simple. It won’t be the solution very often, but it costs nothing and only takes a few minutes.
The most common cause is the installation or upgrade of one program. This new program uses functions in your video drivers in ways that previous programs on your system didn’t. In other words, there was a problem there all along, but since none of your programs used that function it never showed up.
Also, in my experience, Windows and its drivers get “stale” after awhile. A machine that has been working fine for months suddenly starts having problems. No new programs have been installed which coincide with the emergence of the symptoms.
The simple solution to both problems is to get the latest versions of your video and sound drivers (two most common culprits) and install them. If you’re running games or other software that uses DirectX then you’ll need to reinstall DX and/or upgrade it to the latest version, too. This will solve the problem for about 75% of machines.
The next step is to reinstall Windows. Don’t simply delete your Windows directory! Windows now stores some user files in My Documents and other sub-folders.
Reinstalling Windows is much more disruptive. You end up having to reinstall all of your driver updates and all of your applications. Depending on how much stuff you have installed it can takes days to track down all of your installation CDs, drivers, etc and days to get them all installed again.
Some people take a preemptive approach and plan on reinstalling Windows every six months. With practice, and if you’re not a software pack-rat, you can do the whole thing in a day or two.
Reinstalling Windows probably fixes another 10% or so of problem systems. For the rest, you probably need to upgrade to a newer version of Windows.
And of course none of this software installation will help much if you have a piece of hardware that’s dying.
Hmm. I’ve replaced a couple of things on my old computer, so I guess I can check for loose cards & chips on this one.
The only new thing I’ve installed is the driver (is that the right term?) for a digital camera I bought three weeks ago. That could be #1 or #2, right?
I bought this computer lightly used & reconditioned with Windows 95 installed. I can have a friend walk me through reinstalling the whole thing. How do I find new versions of my video & sound drivers? Can I figure out what they are & download them off the net somewhere? I don’t have muchh extra software like games & so on installed…I’m a fairly basic computer user. And finally, a piece of hardware that’s dying would be something like the motherboard?
I’m kind of a babe in the woods when it comes to much of this stuff. My computer guru friends are on vacation so I can’t bug them with these questions.
So…y’all are it! Thanks again. 
Yes, that’s the right term, and it falls under #1 and #2.
New drivers for your video and sound cards are available off the manufacturer’s homepage. To find the manufacture, click on the ‘system’ icon in the control panel, and go to the ‘device manager’ tab. All of your installed drivers will be listed there, and the ones for your video and sound card should have the manufacturer’s name.
Thanks ultrafilter.
On the AOL thing…I know many consider it to be The Evil Empire. I tried a bunch of different ISPs, & (in this area) I always get right on, rarely get booted off…heck, AOL just works. I had 5.0 installed & almost immediately everything went nuts on my old computer & then it crashed, so I got this one in December. IIRC there were so many bugs with 5.0 that people were leaving AOL in droves.
I’ll update drivers & check the innards…Are the “illegal operation” messages & the BSOD connected?
No problem.
Tell me about it.
**
Possibly. Windows can blue-screen for so many reasons that it’s kinda hard to tell.
Dying hardware is pretty unlikely. I just listed it to be thorough. Sorry, I meant to say that in my original post.
ultrafilter has given good answers. Illegal operations and blue screens are both very generic, catch-all error reports. About all they can tell you is, “Somthing bad has happened.” Yes, they could be connected.
Did the crashes become much more common just after you installed the camera? Or were they happening pretty often before that, too?
If they’re happening more often then that’s probably your culprit. Does the camera use a USB interface to talk to your computer? The USB drivers in Win 95 weren’t very stable. You’ll want to upgrade to Win 98.
Even if it’s not using USB, most inexpensive digital cameras have come out in the last few years and expect Win 98 or later. You might want to check the requirements for the camera software and make sure it’ll work with Win 95.
If AOL “just works” for you, that’s worth a lot. I have recommended AOL to a couple of family members and friends. But after awhile some of them have outgrown it. It’s non-threatening for beginners, but can sometimes get in the way once you start to learn a little more about what you want to do with your computer.
One disadvantage of AOL is that it’s a big program trying to do lots of things for you. That’s more opportunities for problems. The particular functions causing you trouble might work on 99% of the computers out there. But there’s some odd combination of drivers on your machine that confuses AOL. It’s not likely, but it is one possibility. Again, updating drivers or updating AOL are a common ways to fix that sort of problem.
As a Mac user, I would just like to take this opportunity to heap gratuitous abuse on such a poorly written OS that needs to be reinstalled from scratch every 6 months. I know one major software development corporation that has is locked into Win95 and prohibits anything higher without compelling reason. They have about 200 PCs with Win95 and about 3 machines with NT4 (Win2k is prohibited). And they automatically restore the OS of each machine from backups every MONTH at a minimum, sometimes once a WEEK if they’re having troubles.
On the other hand, my primary Mac system hasn’t been reinstalled since I bought it in 1996, and it never crashes. Each upgrade has been seamless, even the radical Unix upgrade in MacOS X.
The solution to your windows problem is found in this .sig file I see occasionally:
“The software package said it requires Windows 95 or better. So I got a Mac.”
Something to try whenever AOL 4.0 goes wonky on you:
Sign off
Close AOL
Got to your America Online folder
Select AOL System Information
Select the last tab “Utilities”
Clear the browser cache
Select Uninstall AOL Adapter
Close
The next time you start AOL 4.0, it will tell you it needs to update. Whenever it prompts you asking whether or not you want to replace a newer file with an older one, keep the newer one.
Somewhere along the way you get propmted to restart, so close anything else that’s open before doing this.
The above procedure has remedied every problem I’ve ever had with AOL 4.0.
Good luck!
Chas E, trying to start a flame war? You sure won’t find me defending Windows as a stable operating system. By and large, I think Mickeysoft sucks.
But in my experience, watching co-workers with Macs, one reason Macs are so stable has to do with their small market share. There’s simply less stuff available, therefore there are fewer chances for incompatibilities. (The tacky thing to do here is to ask you what DVD movies you’ve watched on your OS X machine lately. Please take it as ironic humor <grin>)
So, for the light computing tasks that most newbies do, Macs are indeed more stable. But whenever someone tried to push a Mac as hard as many PC users push their PCs, the Macs had very similar problems.
If Macs were the predominant machine with as many different hardware and software options as the PC has, I suspect they’d be equally unstable. It’s just the nature of the beast.
Granted, the “going stale” thing shouldn’t happen to Windows machines. I’ve never heard an informed explanation on what might cause it. But I’ve seen reinstallation fix enough problems to include it in my box of tricks.
Not trying to start a flame war here, but I run more apps than anyone, and my mac is perfectly stable. Virtual PC, hardcore development apps, 3D rendering, etc, all at the same time and I have no problems with stability. I’m running 5 apps right now in the background, I typically have 13 or 14 open when I’m doing development.
I’ve heard of people referring to your problem as “windows rot.” The whole drivers “going stale” thing is the most absolutely insane thing I ever heard of. The only logical explanation would be disk errors, which still wouldn’t explain the problem. In all my many years of working with hard drives, I have only ever encountered ONE bad block. The only other possible explanation would be if windows overwrote and corrupted the drivers. This would be plain old bad programming. After watching Code Red 3 this weekend, is anyone surprised that Occam’s Razor points to the bad programming explanation?
Unplug the computer from wall for at least a minute &plug it back in. The is the first thing to do with any appliance that is having a fit.
Also my computer works better for me if I turn it off at night.