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PC hangs/freezes

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by cornishman 1 view

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I have a customer who has tried to instal new memory in their HP Pavillion 6355 then was unable to get Win98 to boot up. I have changed the chips (2x64mb)with known good ones, checked all connectors etc, backed up hard drive to spare, reformatted hard drive (twice), fresh instal of Win98, with only motherboard, hard,floppy and CD drives installed, cleared CMOS. Windows now starts up ok but entering into any program causes that program to hang/freeze and I have to use task manager to get out. Also Windows will not close down or restart (just hangs again)unless I am in safe mode when it closes OK. What should I check next? It has a 'SPAX' motherboard, AMD-K6 333 processor and 128mb RAM.

11 replies

by dmiles

Check the programs that are running in the background,specifically the anti-virus and screensavers

Try disabling Power Management, then check Task Manager to see if any programs are not responding

Check the video card for driver updates

Check the CMOS panel in setup to see if bios is recognizing the 128M memory

by cornishman

No Antivirus installed yet. No screensavers running.
Disabled power management - no programs not responding. Video is on board - original drivers from Recovery CD should be OK? RAM is recognised OK.

by pgcarter

Well...Hmmm, I would say make sure the memory is set correctly in the bios, speed, timing, latentcy, and so on(different for different bioses.

by shanghai sam

I Back to Basics
1. Lets eleminate some variables
- return to old RAM, and with just the basic hardward: HDD, Floppy, CDRom, keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
2. Does the system see the correct amount of RAM?

by cornishman

Chaps-thanks for your comments. Have tried a donor HDD and everything is fine-system sees correct RAM-have tried both old (48mb) and new (128mb)-all OK. Boots and shutsdown OK. Reverted to original HDD-did Format and Recovery from HP recovery CD - has returned to original fault of not booting. Ram is recognised correctly (old and new).Step by step gets to:
*Plug N Play Bios Detected
*SBpro:I/O=220,IRQ=5,DMA=1
then goes no further. I can launch Safe Mode OK and will shutdown from Safe Mode OK. I have evidence that customer has been in msconfig and regedit but surely these files would have been overwritten by the fresh instal?

by shanghai sam

Chaps-thanks for your comments. Have tried a donor HDD and everything is fine-system sees correct RAM-have tried both old (48mb) and new (128mb)-all OK. Boots and shutsdown OK. Reverted to original HDD-did Format and Recovery from HP recovery CD - has returned to original fault of not booting. Ram is recognised correctly (old and new).Step by step gets to:
*Plug N Play Bios Detected
*SBpro:I/O=220,IRQ=5,DMA=1
then goes no further. I can launch Safe Mode OK and will shutdown from Safe Mode OK. I have evidence that customer has been in msconfig and regedit but surely these files would have been overwritten by the fresh instal?

by polar100

check to make sure that there is not a setting in the cmos that is for antivirus and if there is make sure it is turned off before you install the OS.
Hope this helps.

by cornishman

OK chaps - hands up - the floppy connector WAS reversed !!! But - in my defence....it was reversed AGAINST the 'keyway' on the socket. Now I don't know about you, but that goes against everything I was ever taught about connecting equipment. Is thisnormal practice? Any comments before I close this question down??

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