Have you tried running it with the case open?
Is the cpu fan in good working condition?  Heat
is a suspect.  So is intermitant electrical shorting.
Does it lock up only in windows?  Have you tried
running only in dos?  Windows only crashes would
point to memory,  assuming it crashes before any
drivers were loaded, because windows uses all ram
all the time, while dos doesn't.
Does it freeze in safe mode too?
Then the classic troubleshooting checklist is your
cheapest approach.
Pull everything out you can do without,
the extra drive, some of the ram, sound card, modem,
etc.
Set CMOS to BIOS defaults or known working settings.
Use "AUTO" wherever possible, like for disk size and ram timing.
Boot with a known good win98 diskette, fdisk & format the hard disk
and install win98.  Set video to standard VGA.
If it freezes, start over using different ram.  Keep substituting
parts until you get a configuration that doesn't freeze, then add
the original parts back one at a time, checking each part for
freeze-ups.
Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 1999 7:45 AM
From: Hahnel, Winfried (W.A.)

My computer locks up at random
times just after it has booted up.
I had upgraded to WIN98 about two years ago.
So, I decided to completely start from fresh and reformatted the HD and
installed a Full version of WIN98.
I am still getting the lockups.  They occur within 3 minutes of booting up.
While the system is working, it's running significantly faster.  I also
installed a Microsoft Intellimouse just before the reformat.
SYSTEM:
4 years old
WIN98
4.3 gig Quantam HD
2.1 gig WD HD
48 Meg Ram
100MhZ Pentium Classic
IBM Aptiva.

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