shut down issue

Not wishing to bother anyone with a long detailed story I will try to get the fact out in short order. I built a computer. It was loaded with XP Pro. I installed near 20GB in word processing, photo and graphic programs. It was unstable (several ways). It is ready to be picked up from a repairman who formated the HD and loaded all drivers. He also installed 98 SE because he feels XP Pro may be the problem. Let me just pass on his message to me and if someone has any thoughts please let me know. "However, during the whole process 98 developed it's typcal shut down issue. This prob. is well ducumented @microsoft. I dwnloaded and applied the patch but it didn't help. You will have to
hold the power button in for 4 sec to get it to power down. This will not hurt anything, it doesn't even want to run scandisk @ reboot.

 

Although I'm a big fan of 98se and favor it over XP pro, I have set up XP pro on a couple of my machines and find myself liking it more and more. Having said that however, lets get to the point - you need to find a different repairman.

Your current Win98 shutdown problem is more than likely a result of bios and or memory settings. When you start to get into higher end equipment and I believe you were talking about PC2700 DDR memeory and an Abit MB a couple of few months back - you will find that extracting rock solid stability along with optimum performance requires a pretty good understanding of all those options you have and how various hardware devices relate to each other. Based on what you have just said about your repairman blaming stability problems on WinXP tells me that he doesn't have a very good handle on this either.

I'm not trying to blast you, but I'd bet money on the fact that your 98 shutdown problem and your XP stability problem both relate to the same thing.

Quite some time ago I sent you some links to Abit FAQ's - most if not all of your stability issues would have been discussed here. If I can help you, I'd be glad to - but in the meantime, please understand that your "repairman" has just done you a real disservice.

 

Here was an answer geared more toward XP instabilities, but the same instabilities will be evidenced in 98se.

KX7-333 specific

Several KX7-333 readers have reported that the system will refuse to boot or lock-up under WindowsXP when the PCI Master Read Caching is enabled in the BIOS. Disable it!
Other people have reported that the yellow CMOS clearing jumper can be loose on the motherboard and hence cause random reboots.


Generic Solutions

Do you have a 350W power supply? Using smaller power supplies is the most common cause of instabilities.
Is your RAM correctly configured? This is the second most common cause of problems - see memory section for more information. Surprisingly, several owners have reported that intermittent instabilities with CAS 2.5 SDRAM installed can be resolved by running the memory at CL=2.
Is your system properly earthed (is your wall socket earthed)? Could static electrity be a problem?
Try raising the CPU core voltage and/or I/O voltage by one notch in the CPU power supply section of Soft Menu III in the BIOS.
Try lowering the I/O voltage by one notch in Soft Menu III in the BIOS.
Do you have have all DIMM sockets occupied with memory? Stability can often be achieved by swapping the sockets used by the memory.
Do you have an IRQ conflict the Highpoint controller (on RAID motherboards) and a device in PCI Slot 5, or another device using the same IRQ as the Highpoint controller (usually IRQ 5)? SB16 emulation provided with many soundcards is the usual culprit - see sound section - although NICs can also be a problem.Load latest motherboard drivers
Load latest motherboard BIOS - see bios sectionLoad latest peripheral drivers
If your AGP graphics card is unstable see the video section - be aware that the AGP slot shares an interrupt with PCI slot 1, so try moving any card out of PCI slot 1.Sound card problems can often be resolved by enabling the 15-16 MB memory hole in the BIOS. Note, however, this setting is occasionally the cause of instabilities! I suggest you try both settings!
Note that the BIOS manual explicitly states that the onboard hardware monitor uses I/O addresses 294H to 297H. If you have an add-on card that uses these addresses you must select new I/O addresses for the add-on card. This can be set under System Properties - Device Manager - Properties - Resources.
Don't put other electrical devices near your computer, particularly when you have the covers off. This can leave your system susceptible to interference.
Is your heatsink correctly installed? Incorrect installation of the heatsink can cause the CPU's temperature to rise rapidly and cause instabilities.Is your computer sharing a surge protector with another computer? One user found this to be the cause of general instabilities.
Try running fans (including the video card's) directly off the power supply headers, rather than from the motherboard headers.
If this occurs under WindowsXP and is related to internet activity, it may be because your NIC is not supported correctly. One user reported continual instabilities like this using a Linksys LNE100TX(v4.1) card, until it was replaced.
Try removing the heatsink and fan on the motherboard's northbridge and applying your own thermal paste. Some people have reported that this has resolved odd errors (similar to those seen with memory problems)
With Windows 95, 98 and 98SE set "PNP OS Installed" to Yes in the PNP/PCI Configurations Setup menu. If running ACPI (particularly with Windows 2000) Microsoft advise you set this to No.


VIA Chipset specific

If the instabilities appear graphics related, try reinstalling the VIA 4in1 AGP driver in Normal mode rather than Turbo mode

 

And, here is some info re: 98 shutdown.

There can be a number of reasons for this. These include:

You need to assign an IRQ for VGA in the BIOS
Too many mapped network drives (there is apparently a patch available from Microsoft for that) - see Microsoft's knowledge base article Q260067 "Windows Stops Responding During Shutdown with Mapped Drives"
Check out Microsoft's knowledge base article Q238096 "How to Troubleshoot Windows 98 Second Edition Shutdown Problems"
Check out Microsoft's knowledge base article Q239887 "Windows 98 Second Edition Shutdown Supplement"
This can also be due to the Netgear 310TX NIC. See Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q261766 for details.
One user reported that disabling bus mastering should allow Windows 98 to shutdown properly, but that it slows down the graphics performance substantially. He also suggested that an apparently better workaround is to set the AGP aperture to 16M (this effectively switches off AGP).
If your system reboots rather than shuts down under Windows 98SE you need to disable fast shutdowns - go to Start Menu, Run then type "msconfig" then disable in Advanced... option at the bottom of the first menu
This can sometimes be due to disk corruption - run scandisk and see if there are any problems
Are any unused NIC cards set to use a dynamic IP address? This may be causing problems - set to a static address.
If the system reboots when shutting down with fast shutdown enabled or hangs when shutdown with fast shutdown is disabled, a solution is not to leave any inactive USB xlink cables, eg. PS2 sharkport, connected when shutting down. Windows 98 treats these cables as bad devices.
If the power switch fails to work and/or the machine automatically starts up whenever mains power is applied, it could be that there is a corruption in Window's power management. Using the Shutdown feature in Windows to shutdown and then restart the machine should resolve this.

 

thanks, but my motherboard is a Gigabyte 400DDR

 

Sorry about that, I went back and searched your earlier posts because I thought I had sent you something before re: ABIT. Guess the Abit KX7-333 was your old (Oct 7th) machine.

Regardless, good luck.