Right I've had it with Win98 XP here I Come

[mrstarface]

I've had enough of Windoze 98 crashing constantly for no apparent reason and am going to go with XP, good choice you think?

I had adsl installed yesterday and its the dogs dangly bits but my pc freezes up every 20 minutes or so for no specific reason. It has always been slightly tempremental but this is ridiculous. I;ve heard XP is a lot more stable so am hoping by switching that my problems will come to an end.

I've considered installing it alongside win98 so I can continue using this for playing some games. I head some older games cant be played under xp, is this true? I read a clean install would be better though so is this the route to take?

I currently have 2 60 gig HDD, One is partioned 40gig/20gig and the other just a stand alone 60 gig. The 1st HDD is down as drive C for the 20 and E for the 40. The 2nd HDD is drive D. Win98 is installed on C and ideally this is the only drive I want to format and install XP on as the others have a load of data, music etc that I want to keep. When I install XP will it still recognize the partitions for C and E so I wont lose the stuff on E?

Lastly is there any way I can keep the start menu programs in place for stuff on drives D and E? Its always a pain when these vanish and shortcuts arent the same.

Thanks for the advice people, a bit nervous about doing this!

My Specs Are

Athlon 1.4gig
Gigabyte 7dxr mobo
512 2100 ddr ram
GeForce2 mx
hercules fortissmo soundcard
network card
rockwell modem
firewire card
usb adsl modem

[morriswindgate]

XP is going to give you better stability and with service pack one installed almost as good of performance as a really good working 98 install. The only games that do not work well in XP are the early DOS games from the era of Doom1 and Wolfenstein 3D.
I always tend to wonder what problems that a person has on their computer when they state that they are having repeated freezes with Windows 98. I ran it for several years and never had any real problems that were Operating System related. Most of the problems that I have seen were from improperly installed hardware, junk programs that were installed (Mostly shareware, freeware, and warez), trojan horses/worms, and (the number one reason) improperly uninstalled programs.
I actually still like Windows 98 (and it's cousin Windows ME)(I still have a machine running ME that my daughter has not been able to screw-up in over two years>haven't had to correct an error yet). With the exception of boot-up speed and the fact that you do not have to re-start everytime you change something, I really do not find XP that much of an improvment.

[highrisemech]

System lock up for no apparent reason is usually a power supply problem.

[mrstarface]

Cant undestand it either! I've got a fair few things installed utilities, games, office and some emulators and I d/l a lot of music which I store.

Its only been 3 or 4 months since I installed everything from scratch and the hard drives, usd modem and firewire card are all virtually brand new.

Glad to hear that early DOS games are the only problem, hopefully I can get Quake 1 working!

I'll try and install XP and obviously if I have the same probs then my problem lies elswhere

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EDIT - Got a 350W Macron power supply, do you think it might be that then? How can I test it without forking out the cash for a new one???

[Confused]

I also believe you have some other problem and I think it will manifest itself with XP also. If it is RAM related, XP might not even install. I ran WIN98 2 years and it was very stable if I would boot every couple of days.

Try changing out RAM if you have any extra or if you have more than 1 stick of 64M remove one and see if problem improves.
Chas

[mrstarface]

no spare ram to test with, cant you d/l some sort of memory tester from somewhere??

[sdkfz]

One older game issue I had was with ( kinda ironic here too) Microsoft's own Close Combat (the first one)

The game will not install on a "NT" machine and this issue can crop up on other games of this era. I think there is a work around to make it install by copying the disk to the HD and creating a short cut to the install exe and then in compatibilty mode do the install, but I have the much better Combat Mission from Battlefront.com so I never fully memorized the process or saved the instructions.

Another method would be install all the old games, and then do the XP install over 98, I have heard stories about this not being as good of an install as a clean one and that is why I did a fdisk and complete reinstall. This was when XP first came out so this issue may be no longer applicable.

As to stability, I have since my XP install had 4 crashes, two where causeed when I was using Photoshop LE that needed a reinstall. I am very happy with XP and if you don't like the Mac OS look you can opt for Win 9X look.

New egg sell full version XP OEM for 90.00, you just need to buy some hardware to qualify for the OEM price, sure sounds like an excuse to upgrade the (fill in the blank)

[eldon]

You can go to www.downloads.com and do a search for memory tester,I use Gold Mem I think version 6.0. I used it and it worked great for me.

[Nuclear Krusader]

I am yet to find a game that won't run under XP. I've also played DOOM era games and they run fine. A bit slower but just fine.

[Cricket]

Hi mrstarface,

You can download DocMemory from Simmtester.com. Booting into Safe Mode also tests the memory with Himem.

You say you have a fair amount of things installed...how many of those things run in background?

How are your IRQ assignments? Any devices sharing an IRQ with another device?

The 1.4GHz T-Bird was one of the hottest running CPU's around. Which heatsink are you using? Does your case have good cooling (at least 1 intake fan and 1 exhaust fan)? An overheating CPU or video card will cause system freezes and lock ups too.

What antivirus program are you using? If McAfee, you might want to uninstall it and use something else.

Cricket