Hi,

I've got a strange problem that I've never run into before.  My system is
Pentium II, Win98, 384MB ram.  Over the past few months, I start to hear the
"rattle" that indicates the CD drive is working (light on too) and then the
hard drive light comes on and the cursor indicates it's busy, so no other
program will work.  Originally this happened rarely, but now it's more usual
than not.  When it happens is totally unpredictable as far as I can see.

I ran complete virus scans (trendmicro) and spybot software and eliminated
those and nothing changed.  It happens even when I've disconnected the
internet so it's not some other computer.  I've run scandisk many times with
no problems showing up.  The disk is pretty full (15GB with 525MB not used)
but I don't see how that could be it.  (I've tried defragmenting the disk
again, but I can't seem to get through a complete defrag without the problem
turing up and the defrag freezing.)  I've tried quitting all programs (using
ctrl-alt-del) except explorer and systray and that doesn't change anything.
Which reminds me, sometimes I find the close program window indicating
explorer as not responding, which is certainly true at those times.
Eventually, this often (but not always) reaches a blue screen indicating
that the system is busy or unstable.  If I hit a key to go back, it never
successfully does that.  If I hit ctrl-alt-del to restart the system,
sometimes it does, but usually it just sits there and does nothing.

What can I do?

Steve Brumbaugh

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