Re-booting midway through a boot is typical of a memory issue.  EMM386.exe
and Himem.sys can be causing this, as well as expansion cards and adapters
like your vga that have memory address space.  Typically, your system can
not make a valid memory map, sometimes because it is trying to load
addresses that don't physically exist.  Granted, this is only one
troubleshooting avenue to pursue, you could for instance have a bad cpu, but
I would start here.

Probably the cheapest fix would be a bad .dll or .exe that is writing to
protected memory space.  It doesn't cost you anything except time to
reinstall win95 and test extensively before loading anything else. You could
have a virus, for instance.  Next is removing optional equipment and trying
to get a stable win95 install.  Take out modem, sound, network, ram
expansions, etc.  After that you are into remove and replace mode, trying
spares for memory, disk and vga.

A couple suggestions.  A poor install of video drivers can be looking for
non-existant ram, or writing in windows protected areas.  This can be very
difficult to fix in win95, where it can be tough to get the bad driver out
of the registry so the right one will load. Try switching to the win95
default vga driver.  I would also check the drive out.  With 545meg and
24meg ram, your system is old.  Is the drive properly identified in CMOS as
an lba or large drive so the bios can see sizes larger than 520 meg?  Was
the drive partitioned and formatted under a cmos that correctly identified
its size?  Slight changes to the cmos drive definition as to cylindars and
heads can sometimes provoke your symptoms.
Last, and probably the only thing that will cost any money, is replacing the
ram. You could try adding to your config.sys the line:
device=c:\windows\himem.sys /TestMem:ON /V to see if himem is loading
properly.
Tom Turak
-----Original Message-----
From: Dzingai Chakazamba [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2001 6:02 AM

I recently put together a PC for my kid, and it worked perfectly for some
time until recently.
The PC has  Win95, MS-Office 97, WinAmp, and a few utilities and arcade
games.
Socket 7 M/board with a 233Mhz processor
545Mb HDD
ESS Maestro-1 S/card
24-bit VGA card
24Mb RAM (SIMM)
The problem is that the PC keeps on restarting itself. This even happens
before Windows loads, sometimes just after Windows has load or while he is
working on something. I must admit there isn't much HDD space left, but I
don't think this is the reason. I have checked the SIMM cards by removing
one at a time but they seem OK.
I can provide more info if needed. Please help.

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