Hi there all
I have a Celery 600 with 256 ram and 30 gig HD, Geforce 2GTS on a
generic asus mobo, using WIn98SE all patched up (after a clean
install). Every other programs runs well (no crash) except MS
explorer (either for internet or browsing the C drive - it
crashes). I have upgrade to the lastest IExplorer, to no avail.
The crash seems to be in different DLL files all of the time.
Other 3d resource intensive applications (read: games) work very
very well. So I am puzzled. What can cause this? Any suggestions?
(Well, would that be old DOS games? Even if you have a serious problem
with Windows, that may well run ok.)
Wildly speculating, wrong version of some of the code. Code not
supported by your Celeron, or not supported by your OS.
A Celeron 600 supports MMX, but not (I believe) SSE or SSE2.
'Explorer' is the 'shell' of Windows! It is _NOT_ the same as 'IE' or
'Internet Explorer'. If it regularly crashes in 'explorer.exe',
(rather than IE?) it doesn't mean your problem is necessarily as
isolated, as you may think it does.
Installing IE or DX updates from magazine CDs have messed up peoples
computers in the past. Have you done anything like that?
MS' online Windows Update is more reliable.
Likewise, moving (in any way) installs across computers (or cpus), for
certain results in problems. (If I had a $, for everyone that has
tried that...)
Some real mode device driver? You're not installing hardware things
from batch files or the console interface, are you? Or through
config.sys and autoexec.bat?
Likewise some screwy big complex apps, think they better replace some
system .dlls with their own. As soon as the app is older than the
latest OS patch (immediately), this becomes a recipe for problems.
Uninstall any such suspected app (and hope it restores any dll).
A particular cause for problem might be installing such an app, that
in addition doesn't support Celeron or Windows98SE?
I'd be tempted to suggest you to clean install Windows again. But hold
on, let's discuss it a bit first. You might first want to try
reinstalling updated mobo drivers, if you haven't already. Try get
hold of the latest mobo drivers for your board on the internet.
Also, what does scandisk do, if you run it?
Whenever you install Windows, in particular the older, like 98SE, you
should make sure only the minimum of peripherals is connected. Like a
single graphics device, simple CD/DVD-ROM. Disconnect things like CDRW
and network cards and other PCI cards. (though standard SoundBlaster
and network cards are usually safe to leave in place).
Leaving a CDRW connected, has caused me much trouble in the past (akin
to yours), with Win98SE. Haven't a clue why, it just did.
Then as you install your mobo-drivers, make sure they're reasonably
new. Check out if your PC works ok, without the mobo-drivers, for a
while. If it starts acting up _after_ you install them, then you know
they're causing a problem.
