For 18 months I sucessfully ran W95 OSR 2.5 on one of my systems. I had an occasional BSOD Fatal Exception 0E, and I often had a problem with Explorer crashing and having to be shut down as it was loading the desktop.
Two weeks ago I upgraded it to W98 (NOT SE). It became totally unstable! W98 had problems accessing the Registry on 9 out of 10 startups, and was constantly replacing the Registry with a recent copy. Getting it started was nearly impossible and it was almost guaranteed it would replace the Registry in doing so.
It's an old system that has seen a bit of install/uninstall activity, so I figured I would just put in a new HD and do a full W98 install. Now it just stops during the boot process, usually while the splash screen is up. No error message... it just stops responding and I have to hit the reset button. NOT every time! Occasionally it starts normally. It seems to be able to boot safe mode OK, so I have tried disabling devices in Device Mgr, then reenabling one at a time. But I am still having occasional complaints about a bad Registry and it gets replaced on 1 out of 5 boots or so, causing me to have to go back to square one and disable all the devices again. This behaviour is not triggered by re-enabling any specific device and seems to occur at random.
The system:
FIC VA-503+ v1.2A / AMD K6-2 400
128 MB RAM (2x 64M PC-100)*
C: WD AC26400*
D: WD AC24300
E: HP 8250i CD-RW*
F: LG 32x CD-ROM*
2 floppy drives
Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 PCI video card
AOpen 33.6k internal modem FM336PVS
* = added before first format/full W98 install. In W95 days was 64 MB RAM, single REVEAL 4x CD, single WD HD (24300).
Inadequate power supply (it's 200W)? Real mode driver interfering but not every time? Bad RAM (passed comprehensive test in Norton Diag)? Or???? I would appreciate any suggestions!
BTW it seems to be stable once it gets up and running. It's the startup that is problematic (and restarts).
Two weeks ago I upgraded it to W98 (NOT SE). It became totally unstable! W98 had problems accessing the Registry on 9 out of 10 startups, and was constantly replacing the Registry with a recent copy. Getting it started was nearly impossible and it was almost guaranteed it would replace the Registry in doing so.
It's an old system that has seen a bit of install/uninstall activity, so I figured I would just put in a new HD and do a full W98 install. Now it just stops during the boot process, usually while the splash screen is up. No error message... it just stops responding and I have to hit the reset button. NOT every time! Occasionally it starts normally. It seems to be able to boot safe mode OK, so I have tried disabling devices in Device Mgr, then reenabling one at a time. But I am still having occasional complaints about a bad Registry and it gets replaced on 1 out of 5 boots or so, causing me to have to go back to square one and disable all the devices again. This behaviour is not triggered by re-enabling any specific device and seems to occur at random.
The system:
FIC VA-503+ v1.2A / AMD K6-2 400
128 MB RAM (2x 64M PC-100)*
C: WD AC26400*
D: WD AC24300
E: HP 8250i CD-RW*
F: LG 32x CD-ROM*
2 floppy drives
Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 PCI video card
AOpen 33.6k internal modem FM336PVS
* = added before first format/full W98 install. In W95 days was 64 MB RAM, single REVEAL 4x CD, single WD HD (24300).
Inadequate power supply (it's 200W)? Real mode driver interfering but not every time? Bad RAM (passed comprehensive test in Norton Diag)? Or???? I would appreciate any suggestions!
BTW it seems to be stable once it gets up and running. It's the startup that is problematic (and restarts).
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