CMOS Battery

Is your computer clock losing time? If it is that's
the first sign of a cmos battery going bad.You can remove the cover and battery and check to see if the battery has aleast 3 volts. While you have the cover off clean out all the dust that is in there.This dust can cause your problem. Have you scan and defragged the hard drive? Have you added any new programs before the locking up began? If you have remove them and see if locking up still happens. Hope this helps Frank

The old style NiCad batteries had a service life of 3 years.

The new Lithium batteries have a service life of up to 10 years.
The more time the PC is on, the longer the battery life.

I would start with a good clean-up of the drives.

I would also suggest that it may be time to wipe the drives and start over. Windows 9X has about a 3 year life before it reaches the point of self corruption.

If you don't want to go that far, I suggest that you try a good registry cleaner tool.
I like either Norton Win Doctor, or OnTrack Fix-It.
Both do a reasonable job of finding and cleaning out the junk that builds up in the registry.

Thechas is right but most tech people only wait 6 months to a year to reinstall windows. It becomes so corrupt and the registry too full to do anything about. Try a test, take one computer back up all needed data and blow away windows. I keep the hard drive partitioned so that the c drive can be deleted and not loose any user data. Reinstall windows and put back the short cuts to the apps for the user. And ask them if it worth doing this once a year. after they use it for awhile.

Whoah...
Bad batteries will cause the problems they listed, but it will not cause lockup problems. You can take a battery out and the computer will still run.

You probably have a virus. The viruses that email themselves tend to slow down a computer and cause lockups. This fits in nicely with the fact that all of your computers started doing it around the same time. Get a virus scanner, most places will let you download a tempory free copy. MAKE SURE you update the data files for it, or it is almost useless.

If this doesn't help, do a little detective work to see if there was a common program installed on these about the time they started locking up. It could be the cause.

Beyond that, I'd say you're having power issues. That depends on how many computers you are talking about though. Could you comment on how many are involved? It just sounds too much for them all to be locking up from normal use, all at the same time, to be registry/dll problems unless it was a sftware install that everyone did close to the time your lockups started.

Try that...let me roll it around a little more. Any more info about the PC's you can give?

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