Computer crashing every 5 min or so

[Scee]

After a nasty reinstall of 98 SE to get my ti4200 running I'm experiencing ever increasing system instability.
It will crash almost on demand when I try to run any kind of video in media player (tried several versions) or when I'm using IE (Opera takes longer to crash but it still happens) Sometimes the system stalls while it's still loading zonealarm and I haven't even done anything. (Safe mode goes just dandy) Scandisk turns up nothing. A reinstall of 98 and then SE (I have two disks, which is a pain) is not possible because of the instability. 4-in 1's are installed properly, no IRQ conflicts. I don't want to have to delete windows again, which is what got me in this fix in the first place, so is there anything I can do?

 

[lobadobadingdong]

have you tried re-seating your video card?
re-seating your processor (and applying fresh thermal compound?
re-seating your memory?
is fast writes on? and have you tried turning it off?
is anything overclocked? and have you tried toning it down to defaults?

 

[Scee]

Thanks for the suggestions, I did turn off fast writes, which didn't seem to matter, and I'll try reseating the cards. The longest period of stability I've had was when there was an error in "isengine.dll" and explorer had to shut down. This happened twice when going through "my computer" and seemed to clear things out. Could there be some program I don't know about running in the background and screwing things up? There's nothing according to msconfig. There's also general screen corruption going on with the prob if that helps.

 

[fell8]

Sounds like bad RAM, maybe. May want to test it.

 

[Mem]

Yep sounds like faulty ram to me,had similar problem last week,anyway if you`ve two sticks installed take one out and see if that improves stability if not try removing the other stick.


Try memtest

 

[Scee]

Hey - I tried running memtest86, or whatever it's called, and it didn't turn up any problems. I finally managed to do a windows reinstall and that has reduced the problem to occuring to whenever I have "my computer" derived windows open for a while. There's a prob with "isengine.dll" still. Then it says explorer has to shut down and I can go on my merrry way as long as I don't go back to "my computer". Anyway, does this narrow down what the problem might be?