4x dead. PC games dying. Gave away PC. :(

[Baron Munchausen]

Kamog said:
One of my coworkers has a PC that sometimes takes half an hour to boot up, because it often starts up with a blue screen of death and he has to keep shutting it down and powering it back up until it works. Then it runs scandisk which takes a few minutes. It's a Compaq running Windows 98. The computer tech guy has given up trying to fix it.

If you change the settings when it's up and running to NOT boot the GUI, you can probably get it functioning faster. Lots of minor hardware glitches that are invisible at the command prompt will turn up when Windows tries to load the protected mode drivers. The cause of the problems might well be a 'marginal' component that needs to warm up a bit in order to respond properly to the protected mode drivers. So, if the machine is set to only load the underlying DOS you will possibly be able to get it to boot up to that point with no problems. Then you can let it sit and 'warm up' for a few minutes beffore trying to start the GUI/protected mode shell.