WinME freezes

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Hi!

Does anyone know of problems with WinME freezing/hanging on a regular basis? My son has just bought a system with ME pre-installed, and is getting rather fed up that most of the games that work fine on my Win98SE system just hang/freeze all the time. Also, his software DVD player does just the same but much less frequently (the 98SE system has a DVD card, so is not prone to OS bugs). He has followed some suggestions (turning off video acceleration, removing all tasks except Explorer and Systray, etc) with no luck. Is ME prone to this sort of behaviour? My son is getting to the point of wanting to revert back to 98SE – is this wise – or even easy?

Thanks in advance for any help.

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Both of these problems seem to relate to the graphics card, so there may be a compatibility/driver problem. What card is it? The next culprit could be memory. How much does RAM does the system have? Also, right-click the ‘My Computer’ icon on the desktop and select properties to see how much RAM is shown – memory modules can come loose in transit.
If Me has been loaded as an upgrade to ’98, it is very easy to uninstall, through Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel; otherwise you wil have to reformat the drive/partition that it is installed on and perform a full setup from the ’98 cd-rom.

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Apologies for tardy response (out of office).

I haven’t yet been able to confirm what the graphics card is (though I believe it’s based on the nVidia GeForce 2 chip), so that may be the issue. The memory is just one 256MB item, so I don’t think that’s the problem (otherwise there would be problems in other areas like WP and ME itself – right?)

I have to say that I suspected the graphics card too (which is why we turned the acceleration off), but it still happens no matter what we do. Even The Sims has started to hang occasionally now, and my son thought that was about the only game that didn’t! Doh!

I’ll confirm the graphics card when I can (though I’m away on holiday very soon), and maybe a visit to the supplier site for newest drivers would be a good place to start.

Thanks again.

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Hi again. I was right – the graphics chip is a nVidia GEForce2 MX chip based one, so I looked on the nVidia site for updated drivers. What I found was a ‘unified’ driver for ALL their current chips (version 12.41), whereas my son’s current driver is a GEForce one numbered 4.12.01.0752!

I think a call to the OEM supplier is called for; I think an update to the driver is called for, but we don’t want to upset anything else by doing this, and a return to the old drivers would be nice as a fall-back.

Anyway, thanks for your help, Patrick.

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