You wrote "I guess for now I will concentrate on the bios end. New hard
drive and completely fresh windows install on this system." Given that you
had asked questions related to BIOS configuration and your second sentence
was incomplete (I noted the fullstop and capital N), my interpretation was
that these were ALL things you were considering/concentrating on (perhaps
after previous attempts) - hence my querying the need for a new hard drive.
Thanks for clarifying that information.
I still need to know if you've installed all the motherboard drivers on your
Win98SE installation (irrespective of that one device manager exclamation
mark). Did YOU do the OS installation or did someone do it for you? If you
did it yourself you should know, if not, it won't hurt to install them all
again. How did your reading up on BIOS options go? I hope you were able to
confirm the settings are right - I don't have your board and the specific
options will differ from my hardware. Finally, under Windows 98SE, if you
install it on some ACPI compatible motherboards (which yours will be), you
will likely need to use a switch during installation to force it into an
ACPI installation (rather than just APM). As this is power related, it may
also hold a clue as to what's going on. Here's the MSFT KB article on it:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q186111 When you
shut down your machine from Windows, does it turn off completely or go to a
black screen with orange writing telling you its safe to turn off your
machine?
Re the question you raised below, please replace the "to" with an "and" in
my sentence. Its been a while since I've used MMC 7.1 so I'm not sure how to
find its compatibility checker. On slightly newer versions than you have,
there was a cube looking MMC related icon under control panel, perhaps yours
is the same? There is also a problem report wizard built into many ATI
drivers (accessible through right clicking on the ATI system tray icon). If
you run this, it should generate a text file with relevant details and
provide clues to any problems. Yes you're right about dxdiag, it is a MSFT
provided tool for DirectX.
Paul