You are on right track. The first thing you need to do as you said, more
RAM, 32mb is too small. but make sure you take care of compatibility issue.

then, try to get updated drivers for user hardware, old win95 drivers maynot
carry over well in win98, especially the blue/green bar cross screen
problems, it sounds like graphics related, but also could mean a out-of-date
BIOS.

next, try to clean software environment.

If all failed, best to thing to do is: get a test harddrive (physical
disconnect users' harddrive from machine, keep it at safe place), and do a
fresh win98 install on it, if it fixed the problems, you know what to do.
(at leaset, you know where the problem is)

Jun Qian

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Whalen" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2002 4:11 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Odd Win 98 System Behavior


> Hey folks,
>
> I am diagnosing a Windows 98 system. The user is complaining about
> general sluggishness and instability.
>
> The instability issues are as follows: general GPFs, crashes, and an
> occasional-to-often total lock-up that's accompanied by a black
> screen, then a vertical blue or green bar down the right half of the
> monitor.
>
> It's a PII-300 with 32 Megs of RAM running Win98 FE which had been
> upgraded from Windows 95.
>
> The system takes nearly five minutes to boot. He is running a number
> of tasks at boot-up but even booting into Safe Mode took nearly three
> minutes (with a lot of unusual disk crunching sounds, I might add).
>
>
> The first thing I did was add RAM. The user is running several
> background tasks at boot-up and there were 2 megs physical memory free
> under normal conditions with a fat swap file.

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