[Just JD]

This problem will make you want to pull your hair out. Computer is a few years old and has had Win ME on it from day one. It belongs to a neighbor first grader who has school learning games on it. Socket 7 mobo with K6 500 processor. Win ME started freezing at desktop. Thought the hard drive bad. Tried 2 more. With a new install of ME on a each newly formatted drive. When then desk top loads the first time it freezes, even on the 2 new hard drives. Tried new video card, same. shut off floppy, cd rom, audio, tried new ram and all with the same results. Bios say temp always at 100 or below. Fan running at 4875. Same happens when in safe mode, freezes at desktop. Here's the kicker I put in an old 2 gig drive loaded with win 98 and it works fine. Played around about a half hour, no problem. Thought I would Try to load XP, everything installed ok but when it went to load first time, black screen with XP logo it froze there. Anybody have any ideas.

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Check the caps and see if ther are any blown or bulging ones.
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[peterm]

Check the caps and see if ther are any blown or bulging ones.
click on me

[Neil Jones]

Board problem by the sounds of it, especially if its still doing the same thing on brand new hard drives, new memory, etc.

There's nothing special in Windows 98 over ME, the only real difference is 98 requires you to install the chipset drivers yourself as it doesn't have them built in, unlike ME and XP.

Therefore I reckon if you install some chipset drivers into Windows 98, it'll find a whole bunch of new devices and then the computer will start doing the same thing again under that as it was doing under Windows ME.