I’ve been experiencing lots of PC problems, principally my PC freezing up quite a bit. One of the more common messages is a “msgsrv 32” error, but there are others. All I have loaded is Win98, Office 2000 Premium, IE, plus the drivers for my Zip drive (which often freezes up), and for my Zoom! modem and Epson printer. That’s it.
I also have McAfee Virus Shield installed and–brace yourself–I use Norton SystemWorks 2000, which I run from disk only and use the WinDoctor, supposedly to keep things running smoothly. Frankly, I like WinDoctor, as it looks impressive, has lots of bells and whistles, and suggests that it’s doing a real fine job. (grin.)
Here’s my Q: my friend thinks that running WinDoctor could be causing–rather than resolving–conflicts. He says stick with ScanDisk. Other than not turning my computer on, what can I do to keep Win98 running smooth as silk?
You should remove windoctor and mcafee from active memory if you are loading them on start up and only run them from the disk. Both are resource hogs and can affect system stability in some cases. Having said that your mostly likely problems are corrupted drivers, a bad memory chip or a flaky CPU in order of likelihood.
Save your data and do a disk format and re-install without Mcafee and Nortons. If the stability problem persists look into the hardware issues mentioned above.
I agree that windoctor may be causing more problems than it resolves. Also note there is no way you can prevent all freeze ups. My suggestion is to get rid of as many things as you can and run the bare minimum. Then if you like add one by one. But I have found my system runs most stable without virus software and other things designed to “improve” my “experience” .
I’ll add to this to max out your memory capacity on your machine (and do the others as well! Nothing screws up your machine like anti-virus software, for some odd reason.). I know Win98 is supposed to be able to run with 16 megs of memory, but I’ve found that the best thing I’ve done to break it of being crash-happy is to boost my memory up to 196 megs. Even then it still seizes up from time to time. (It’ll probably do that any second now.)
Going off my own experience as a network consultant here are my suggestions.
Get rid of WinDoctor – yes, only use Scandisk and Defrag, they are minimal on resources and don’t usually interfere with Windows. I have used some of Norton’s utilities software to “make my system run nicely” but usually ended up with more problems.
Get rid of McAfee. I have used both McAfee’s antivirus software and now stick with Norton Antivirus. McAfee gave me nothing but trouble, both on my machine and on machines at a client’s office. Once I uninstalled McAfee things ran better and I have had good luck running Norton Antivirus on Win98 SE and Win2K on this machine.
Some friends (fellow computer geeks) and I believe that one of the main problems with Windows crashes is non-Microsoft software. The theory behind it is that for the most part software developers don’t have a clue how Windows really operates. It comes down to a non-Microsoft company trying to fake it.
The question remains through, can you make a completely Microsoft machine?
For one, Microsoft doesn’t make anti-virus software. So forget about downloading anything on the web. Also forget about all those non-Microsoft developed device drivers you need to install. Lastly, forget about any non-Microsoft games on the machine. No fun!
So basically you’ll always have risk with anything you install or run on your machine.
You *could[/] dump the MS O/S in the first place (bear with me), install Linux, become an expert, then run Windows inside of a virtual machine. Then, if you have problems, erase Windows completely, and reinstall the fresh backup.
Likewise, I think Connectix finally has their “Virtual PC for PC” out – lets a computer emulate itself.
My friend said that overheating may cause the PC to lock up. I just bought his PC and he had installed at least three fans in it. I don’t know if his statement was true, but at least I always can here when my new PC is on.
