Upgrading to Windows Me will do little or nothing to help the stability of your
systems, if you can even get it installed on these systems.  Me requires 150MHz
or faster and will not install on anything less.  Windows 2000 might prove
impossible to install on some of your older systems and since it likes memory
so much, it may be performing badly on your systems and you will curse 2000.

The problem is indeed that you have older systems and probably all are unique.
 The older systems and most of the newer ones have ISA components.  These
components are not really plug and play and can therefore generate conflicts at
boot up time, they are more plug and pray.

There are a couple of things that you can do, short of getting new PCs.

1- If indeed you are getting "Illegal operation" messages, reinstall the
application, not the OS.
2- If a 32 bit program crashes in Windows 95/98/ME, the OS is now corrupt.
 Reboot the box and clean out the temp directory.
3- If the system freezes on its own or crashes, check for hardware conflicts.
 If none are found, and they usually will not show up, crank back the
acceleration for the video card in the System Properties/Performance
tab/Graphics... Bring it back one notch.  If the system still does not perform
more reliably, bring it back one more.  This also supposes that you have the
latest drivers for all you hardware on all the systems.  It is much easier to
keep track of this when you have a fleet of similar computers.
4- Clean out the temp directory often.
5- Defragment your disk every once in a while

If this doesn't cure the problems, open up the box and reseat all the boards,
and make sure the CPU and power supply fans are working and are unobstructed.
 Also, get more memory:

For Windows 95/98/Me  A good starting place is 64MB, more can be better but
only marginally so.
For Windows NT/2000 workstation, a good starting place is 128MB, more is always
better.

Kind regards,

Denys. . .

Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP
(800) 323-8863  (281) 288-7438         Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com                             www.hicomp.com


-----Original Message-----
From:   Nick Demos [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Monday, October 23, 2000 10:41 AM
To:     [log in to unmask]
Subject:        OT Wintel PC's

Fellow listers, I need some advice here.

I have several HP PC's of different ages and models in the
office.  They all un under Windows'98 Second edition (4.10).

1.  The problem - the ones being heavily used go down as
    often as twice a day (illegal operation) There is no
     particular pattern to this.  We run Microsoft apps
(    Word and Excel) and Quick books mostly.  We have tried
     reloading Win'98.  Doesn't help.

2.  Options are:
        A.  Live with it (ugh).
        B.  Upgrade to win'2000
        C.  Upgrade to Win 'Me

Your comments, hopefully based on actual experience) are
invited.

TIA

Nick Demos