Gateway P200 GPF's and other errors

[mikeinfwa]

I've assemble about 10 computers and reformatted about 20 times on various boxes.
My neighbors Gateway p200 has got me stumped. It has the following:

P200
VX chipset board
onboard sound
onboard video
2.5 gb hd
modem
16x cdrom
64mb sdram
windows 95

I added another 32 mb ram about a year ago.
I added a pci 4mb video card about 6 months ago. (disable the onboard ATI through win95 device mgr.)

the past month or so he's been getting numerous GPF's and fatal exception errors.

His warranty was over so i told him i would fdisk and format his drive and install win98SE. This clean install was the first time i have ever encountered error messages and blue screen "O" death during the installation. I have tried 3 times and still get many errors during the install.

Is the a memory issue or motherboard problem?

I also tried some faster ram (2 sticks 32mb pc100 from PNY). His machine only showed 2 stics of 8 mb sdram for 16mb total.

Should i try using his original 32mb stick from oem. Maybe the added ram is causing errors? (when i added the 32mb a year ago the machine booted up and found all 64mb during post)

Could this machine be too weak for win98SE?? should i try to install windows 95B instead of win98SE?

thanks

mike

 

[classy]

Don't write this in stone, but I believe 98 or 98se is a more efficient os than 95. I think 98 does need a bit more memory though. Have you check the hard drive throughly for bad sectors, whether its having problems with writing or reading from the disk? It sound like the hard drive. The motherboard which is fairly old now might be failing. Check out the video. Remove the pci card and see what happens with the onboard video. Try the card in a different slot. Try moving the ram to a different slot. I would start with the hard drive though.

 

[mikeinfwa]

Thanks,
I did remove the pci video and tried with the onboard video only. Still had errors during install.

The only Hard drive checks i did were the automatic ones that scandisk performs before the install begins. it said the drive was ok.

mike

 

[mikeinfwa]

bump