Win98SE resource problem - ideas?

[azkiwi]

98SE runs fine - most of the time. For several weeks it has had a very irritating habit of intermitently "locking up" after several hours (all day) running.

The disk light comes on as though major disk actiovity is occurring, though nothing is really happening. I can still move the cursor but any action is delayed for up to a minute, til the disk activity stops.

Windoze reports 50-65% available resources (I'm running a K63-800 with 128 megs) but obviously nothing is available. If I let this go on, it rapidly gets worse until I get full lock up and BSD.

I used Memturbo for a while, not much difference, and even with virtually no TSRs the same thing happens, so if its a memory leak its within the OS. I've cleaned the registry and reinstalled 98SE, but it remains!

I'm oletting the OS manage memory because I read SE does a much better job itself without human meddling than previous versions. That said, WIn98 never did this.

I've updated all the drivers,a nd have no (known) hardware conflicts.

I will entertain all suggestions!!

 

[kmike75]

Are you sure you have a K63-800? Try alt-control-del to see what's running. If you have a utility suite such as Norton running it could be eating your resources. Some utility programs run a virus scan, crash guard, and other applications that use resources. I don't even run microsoft's task scheduler for this reason. I clean up my machine and run scan disk and do defrags at my command about once per month. Is your system a compaq ( ack.. ) or another brand name? Some companies tend to load up machines with all sorts of junk that runs in the background.

 

[azkiwi]

I am indeed running an Athlon, on a KA-7, and no it sure isn't a Compaq (ugh)- I built it myself.

I do not load Scheduler.

As for other TSR's aside from the very few things necessary for operation (Systray, explorer and the logitech mouse driver) nothing is running in the background except the fax driver (WinfaxPro 10)and I'm pretty sure the system ran normally with Winfax before this problem came along.

Thanks for taking an interest.

 

[Sunner]

Said K6-3 800 in your first post 🙂

Anyway, check how big your swap file is when the comp gets like this.
Its a file named win386.swp and it should be in your base windows directory.

 

[azkiwi]

hmmm - turns out I have four of these files ( none in the base directory c:\)

69632 KB D:\
36864 KB E:\
409600 KB F:\
409600 KB G:\

what does that mean?

 

[ctll]

boot from a dos boot disk or bypass your startup files, and delete them.

 

[Varmot]

Just a thought, you may be running out of harddrive space on C:. If this is the case move you swap file to a different partition that has a least a 150 MB.

Good luck

 

[azkiwi]

I have heaps of free disk space available - 15GB on the C drive alone.

Here is what has transpired in the interim:

I deleted all the win386.swp files, but found that windows kept recreating the new one on my D drive.
I found 117MB(!)(hidden files) of a Win98 installation that Disk Cleanup declared surplus - I deleted it.
I found that under Virtual Memory there were grayed out settings for 5000 on the D drive (its full size) - apparently even though this was grayed out windows kept allocating it anyway - I changed that to 600 on the C drive. On reboot I finally got a swap file on the C drive.

That was just a few minutes ago, so we'll see if that fixed the problem.

All this prompts another question - how do I get rid of old entries in the start file? When I run msconfig there are now numerous instances of files like LoadPowerProfile and run=hpsched [I think a registration reminder for an HP product(!)]. I have them unchecked, but it would certainly clean things up if I could delete them..