StarDestroyer.Net BBS

It won't. If I have it running for any length of time or do anything remotely useful, it won't shut down. It gets to that "Windows is Shutting Down..." screen and sits there. And it isn't just my computer, either: my sister's laptop does it, and so do the ones at my ol' school (except on very rare occasions where they're being nice). What's up with that?

So far, the only solution I have is to restart the bloody thing. Except my computer takes a bitch of a long time to finish loading at the desktop for some strange, unknown reason, so this solution is time consuming and annoying.

Any ideas?

How much stuff do you have running in the taskbar (bottom right of screen). If you have 10+ icons there (not including stuff like volume), that could do it. Every time you start/shut down the computer, it has to load/unload all those. That can take awhile.

The "doesn't shut down" thing is just a 98 bug, methinks. Happens to me, nothing you can do, as far as I know.

Windows 98 is shitty. In the two years I had a Win98-powered computer, it shut down properly about 25% of the time, and got a LOT worse near the end, when it was really accumulating Windows rot.

I had that problem

Y'know what fixed it for me?


Windows update.

Yeah, thats one of many glitches in Win98. It was somewhat fixed in 98SE. You can download the shutdown update from Windows Update, but it doesn't work on some computers. You can just hit the power button if it freezes at that screen without having to worry about anything.

Get XP (or 2000 if you're a purist) and leave a bare-bones Win98 installation only for games or other incompatible stuff. It's a great solution

Avoid installing anything you don't absolutely need to run those specific apps under that Win98 install, like the latest updates, DirectX, OpenGL, your multimedia drivers, etc.

That is what I do. Right now I only use the alternate installation to watch porn on the pay-per-view channels, because the decoder software doesn't work right under XP and its no-direct-access driver policy I'll probably also use it to play Planescape (it crashes XP after a few minutes of play) or that FPS about the alternate timeline when WW1 never ended. (storm something) which also crashes the system.

Clean up you temp directories and config.sys and autoexec.bat. Add an entry in system.ini under [vcache], MaxFileCache=8192

Vertigo1 wrote:Yeah, thats one of many glitches in Win98. It was somewhat fixed in 98SE. You can download the shutdown update from Windows Update, but it doesn't work on some computers. You can just hit the power button if it freezes at that screen without having to worry about anything.

Actually, I gotta go through ScanDisk when it does that. Never seems to be a problem that ever comes up though. *shrug*

Mitth: I have five buttons, including Task Manager and the Volume one.

First, Windows 98 is NO LONGER supported by Microsoft.

Second, Rogue, go to run and run msconfig. Go to Startup and make sure you don't have too much stuff running that's not needed.

If you need any help, just pm me.

It has something to do with the APM/ACPI driver

Check if it's working

I went through and cleared off some of the crap this machine came with (long story short, this machine was meant for someone else as a gift, they didn't want it, so we got it). That left the only thing I figured I didn't need in the MSConfisg Startup thing as some Mail.com crap, which I unchecked.

It now takes about 1:17 to start up. Is that good, bad, or medicore?

What all is on your startup still checked? There is probably a lot more you can uncheck.

Kelly Antilles wrote:What all is on your startup still checked? There is probably a lot more you can uncheck.

Most of it is located in C:/WINDOWS or C:/WINDOWS/SYSTEM. Then there's my anti-virus stuff, and some stuff for my printer. Finally, there's FindFast and the Task Manager thing.

One oddity is two things called "LoadPowerProfile" and they're both in Rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,LoadCurrentPowrScheme and they're both identical. Not sure what it is.

Hm, wanna bet you need an update for your virus program OR it won't work with Win98 anymore?

Kelly Antilles wrote:Hm, wanna bet you need an update for your virus program OR it won't work with Win98 anymore?

That's possible...

It hasn't bugged me about an update in awhile though. Maybe it's "beyond" Win98 as of the last update I had.

I was going to blame it on the printer (because it was a minor fiasco to install the thing) but when I thoguht back far enough, it was starting up slow prior to that.

Is there any way to view what's loading as the startup goes on? Seeing what comes in last would be handy to try and pinpoint the problem (or rather, seeing what takes a long time to show up).

Of course, since that provides a fairly easy solution, odds are there is no such utility.

I've had my Windows 98 computer for about 5 years. Weep for me.

HemlockGrey wrote:I've had my Windows 98 computer for about 5 years. Weep for me.

I had a Windows 95 for seven (1996-2003). I only just a few months ago went up to this Win98 one.

Speaking of windows problems, my windows ME now has a funky weird tint to it where green is light brown. It happened after I played Delta force Black Hawk down and now it wont stop. Any ideas?

Agent Fisher wrote:Speaking of windows problems, my windows ME now has a funky weird tint to it where green is light brown. It happened after I played Delta force Black Hawk down and now it wont stop. Any ideas?

Smash your screen and throw the moniter out the window. That'll solve it.

Unless you want some practical ideas, in which case... Does your moniter have one of those little control panel thingies on it that changes screen size, brightness, etc? That might have something... Otherwise, you could try going into the Control Panel and seeing if Display Properties or anything else can help you.

Tried all of that. and there is no reason to this madness. It will be working good fr 5 minutes and then it freaks out. and then at random times it works again. I have tried everything short of kicking it and rebooting the computer.

RogueIce wrote:It won't. If I have it running for any length of time or do anything remotely useful, it won't shut down. It gets to that "Windows is Shutting Down..." screen and sits there. And it isn't just my computer, either: my sister's laptop does it, and so do the ones at my ol' school (except on very rare occasions where they're being nice). What's up with that?

So far, the only solution I have is to restart the bloody thing. Except my computer takes a bitch of a long time to finish loading at the desktop for some strange, unknown reason, so this solution is time consuming and annoying.

Any ideas?

I have this problem a lot at work. It's usually caused by Windows being unable to unmount/disconnect network drives properly (regardless if you've actually got any drives mapped). I use a pair of patches (a shutdown problem patch and a network drives patch) when I find a machine that does it, but I can't get to said patches from home.