Lately my PC has been having “seizures,” a program will freeze for a second, and then suddenly come back to life. Occansionally other programs running at the same time will freeze up as well, but not always. The problem will continue with the program progressively having more and more problems over a period of weeks until I finally have to reinstall the program to get it to work at all. Any ideas of what could be causing this? I’ve got a 750 MHZ AMD K-6 processor with 320 megs of RAM, a Voodoo 3 video card, a Soundblaster sound card, and I’m running Win 98SE. My anti-virus software’s up to date, and the system’s clean. Any ideas of what could be causing this? I’m thinking that it might be hard drive related but I’m not sure. (Oh, the motherboard’s not getting too hot, I’ve got a temp gauge for it and it stays around 38 C, plus I bought a more powerful fan than it needed.)
Tucker,
Is it one application in particular having this problem? You mentioned other apps having difficulty, but do they need to be shut down and restarted also?
Also, how much free space is available on your drive? Your swap file may not be large enough.
It’s not one application in particular, at times all of them will seize up and at others it’ll only be one. One application will, however, seize up more than the others and will continue to do so until I re-install it, at that point it will operate more or less normally and another application will start to seize up regularly. The current free space on my drive is 5.4 gigs and I’ve not tampered with the default swapfile settings. I’ve also defragged the drive not too long ago and that doesn’t seem to help (in fact, it might have been what caused the problems now that I think about it).
Have you tried running System Monitor to see if there are any spikes in processor usage during the times when things freeze? Also, have you checked your startup files (using TweakUI or msconfig.exe) to see if something may have crept in while you weren’t looking?
My machine doesn’t have system monitor installed on it so I can’t check that, but it doesn’t seem to matter how much I’ve got running or what it’s doing, something will decide to seize up, so I don’t think that it’s a sudden load on the processor. (If it is, then what’s caused it to suddenly start happening?) I’ve checked my startup files and there’s nothing there that hasn’t been there since before the problem started occuring. There were a couple of programs that seem to make the problem worse (realplayer stuff), so I’ve gotten rid of them, but I still get the seizures.
Windows do seize up though that’s most likely caused by the system thrashing the paging file.
That will not corrupt your applictions though. Most curious.
Nitpick here–if you’re running at 750, it’s not a k-6. K-6’s maxed out at around 400 mhz. It’s probably an Athlon.
You could try taking out some of the spare memory to see if your RAM is corrupted. Try defragging your hard drive or do a clean install of windows.
I have had really good luck with a tool called System Mechanic. You can download a copy at www.download.com for a 30 day trial. It is simple to use and allows you to clean up and tune many aspects of your computer. You may want to give that a try.
Oh good, I was hoping a thread like this would come along.
My current rig keeps giving me blue screens at seemingly random times. Sometimes its KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED, or UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP, or the dreaded IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. I’ve formatted and reinstalled various windows: 2000 pro, 2000 server, 2000 advanced server, and XP…and STILL my system remains unstable. This seems to point to a hardware problem, but I don’t know how to determine which components are causing me trouble.
Here’s my specs:
Athlon +1800
Micron 256 MB DDR Ram
Geforce 2 GTS
Asus A7A266 Motherboard /w Audio
Win2k Pro (for the moment)
One thing I notice is that you have a lot of RAM. W98SE still has some problems with memory over 256 MB. Here is an article on memory management in W98SE.
However, I doubt that’s going to solve the problem, and there is a darker possibility… Darth VIA. We don’t know right now if you have a VIA chipset motherboard, but if you do there are some solutions. You might want to try H.Oda’s remarkable little program, WCPUID, which will give you some chipset information which you can in turn use to identify the mobo.
If you do have a VIA-based motherboard, go to the last FAQ on this page and read up on the infamous 686b bug, the bane of early Athlon-VIA users everywhere. It involves a conflict between the VIA 686B southbridge and Soundblaster Live! cards, and it drove people nuts for a very long time.
As always, this is just a guess, and you must remember to be very, very certain that you have your ducks in a row before you go flashing BIOSes and such.
I may be out in left field, but that comment about defrag you made earlier has me curious.
When you ran it, are you sure it finished its routine? Did it run into any problems when it ran? How about how long it took to run, normal, or excessively long?
The reason I bring up the non-finishing angle is that the same thing happened to me back in my day. Defrag never fully finished its routine before I shut it down and tried running apps on it again. After about a week the thing was getting funky all over. Programs crashed, hickupped, and sometimes never even ran.
When I finally figured out it might be down the defrag line, almost all the major apps had been effected in one way or another.
What I did was to switch into safe mode (F5 on start-up) and run scandisc and then defrag. After the reboot I did some tweaking with the programs to get them to run smoothly again (I think I re-installed the worst offenders) and after that they all seemed to be fine, relatively speaking.
Again, this might be way out there, but it’s worth a shot.
You may simply be running out of RAM due to a program with a memory leak. Try something like RamBooster to monitor and recover your RAM and see if that helps.
Don’t think that its a memory leak issue as I’ve got MaxMem installed which is supposed to take care of that. I’m not sure if the defragging is the source of the problem, though because even after I re-install a program I can have trouble with it. (It’s not as bad as it was before the re-install, but it still happens.)