Window Me Hang up

Sounds like you have:

Insufficient RAM;

Too much RAM;

A memory leak;

Too many programs running in the background.

For Windows 9X / Me, I recommend between 128MB and 384MB of RAM.
If you have more than 511MB of RAM you can trigger a bug in the code that can cause all kinds of issues.

A related issue is using too small a fixed size virtual memory (swap file).
I recommend either letting Windows control virtual memory settings itself, or setting a fixed minimum of 2 times installed RAM with NO maximum.
You should ALWAYS have a minimum of 500MB free hard drive space on the system (C:) drive.

As far as running programs, each icon in the system tray represents a program that is running and using up system resources.

Memory leaks is another story.
You can run resource meter (I think it is in Me) to see how much memory and CPU time is being used.
If either is over 20% with the system setting idle, you have a memory leak.

A good temporary work-around is to install a memory manager such as Mem-Turbo.

Unfortunately, the only way I have found for fixing memory leaks is a fresh clean installation of Windows.

Chas

Reset your bios setting to default and try again.
Check if all the fans on the motherboard are working.

Remember months before ME came out it was advertised like crazy? The day it hit the shelves... No more advertising? Reasons for that:

1. ME highly unstable - Super looking but runs worse than win95

2. If you have sleep mode, or hibernation mode on, your system will continue to lose resources until it fully locks up. Also causing some of the issues you described above.

3. Use an outside program - http://www.executive.com/trialware/trialware.asp

It's called Diskeeper / diskeeper lite... It will do you defrag faster and better than the OS defrag (The OS Defrag was built from this engine).

I had this problem on old win 95 98 computers...see if the Anti-Virus program is running.
When defraging or disk checking make sure that the screen saver is off and that anti- virus is also off.

Run:
start>run> msconfig and see if there are any other processes running that might interfere. If you look in the "start up" tab you can disable things from starting up upon boot.

Run CHKDSK/f from a DOS window. Then run SCANDISK - thorough - automatically fix errors on system and data areas. Defrag the HD.

One bad sector (can not read) will stop defrag especially if defrag is in that sector. CHKDSK then scandisk will move it out of that sector.

BTW - Worked for ME.

The defrag answer is a good chooice but I don't know that it will work porperly in an MS-DOS window. You may need to restart the computer with the WinMe startup disk and run scandisk thorough from there. A defrag may help afterwards but if the problem is a bad sector it will still cause errors and problems when the info in that sector is called on.