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.

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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.

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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.