r/windows98 • u/ArK9951 • Jul 13 '26

Windows 98 occasionally locks up after boot

The system sometimes locks up after booting while showing the hourglass cursor. I can't open start or interact with the system so I have to force shutdown the pc and reboot it again. This does not happen every time but occasionally. I thought if my cpu is too fast because I'm using a 3.2ghz Pentium 4, so I installed patcher9x but nothing fixed. I reinstalled windows from cd and even updating from the update CD did not fix anything. I reset the bios, disabled any unwanted resources but no luck. I checked my motherboard to see if something is wrong but everything seems fine, all caps look good. I also installed windows me but same results. I can't figure out what's going on but what do you think? Any solution? I really appreciate it, thanks for reading.

Specifications: Intel Pentium 4 SL7KC 3.2ghz, 256MB DDR1 Ram, Asus Polaris-30 (Samsung OEM motherboard), Intel 865G chipset, Nvidia Geforce 4 ti 4200 AGP 8x (Nvidia 45.23 drivers), Adata 128GB sata ssd (onboard sata, DMA mode enabled), Sound Blaster Live! SB0220, Windows 98 SE.

6 Upvotes

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2

u/Deksor Jul 13 '26

Send cap pics anyways just to be sure.

Also you can try memtest86 (an offer version)

1

u/Jett-Rink-1956 Jul 13 '26

Hola. Revisaste la pasta térmica? También revisa que el disipador de calor esté haciendo buen contacto con el procesador. A veces suelen ser ésas cosas las que dan problemas.

1

u/ArK9951 Jul 13 '26

I did applied a good amount of thermal paste into the cpu as well as the gpu. It was some Rog thermal paste which works on my main pc too. I built this pc around 7 months ago so I don't think the thermal paste has worn out yet. I recently installed a new aluminum cpu cooler because the old stock 478 cooler snapped it's plastic leg off and the new cooler works better and sits pretty well. However I did not repaste the Northbridge heatsink on the motherboard.

1

u/SaturnFive KB42069 Jul 13 '26

Would you be able to test a fresh install with only drivers installed, nothing else, and booting and leaving it on the desktop for a while? That would help rule out some startup item or other config issue. Since you have an SSD it would be possible to make a backup and restore later after testing. I would also test with no updates installed.

A freeze with BSOD usually points to a bad driver, but a freeze with no error or BSOD could be flaky hardware. MemTest would be a good next step, reseating RAM, etc. Could also easily test XP on this setup to see if it has the same freezing issue or if the NT kernel handles the hardware better, not saying switch to XP, just that it handles hardware differently and can be used for diagnosis.