windows upgrade - is it the right choice?

[garygjk]

Hello all,

This is my first time on the forum (though my third time trying to post this message!), so my apologies if my query seems somewhat basic. I know just enough about computers to get my PC into trouble, but not enough to fix it if I do, so I wanted to get the opinion of people who know what they’re talking about first.

I’ve had my PC for about five years now. It’s an IBM Aptiva, with 4.02 GB, a little under half of which is currently unused, with an AMD-K6 3D processor and 56.0KB of RAM. I currently have Windows 98 SE, with MS Office 2000 Premium, Norton Antivirus 2001 and Internet Security 2004 and an old dial up 56K modem. The other main additions are Adobe 5.0, HP 610C Desk jet printer and a Cannon scanner with Photo studio 2000.

I regularly run disc defragmenter, scan disc, PC Doctor, anti-virus scans and have Norton on whenever I go on the Internet. I don’t use the PC for too many things, WP and spreadsheet documents, the web and email, playing CD’s and viewing Adobe documents pretty much sums it up. But I still get constant errors of the ‘windows caused an error’ type (I can’t say I recall exactly what the warnings read). Needless to say there plenty of restarts, and a lot of swearing, involved.

So my question is this – would any of my problems be solved if I upgraded to Windows XP Home? Or, would I be letting myself in for a host of new software conflict problems? I don’t want to lose Norton, I downloaded it online and didn’t pay the extra for the option to reload within the year, and obviously I don’t want to lose the other stuff on my hard drive, like my website pages. It may be I just need to fix a few bugs in my system I don’t know about. My PC does what little I need it to do most of the time, so might XP help improve that or make things worse?

Any thoughts welcome,

Gary

[Alan]

If you only have a 4 gig hard drive I personally wouldnt upgrade to XP, your hard drive just isnt big enough to take all the critical updates and patches.
Try running Dr Watson (one of your resident system tools) to see what problems turn up.
Check the Windows Update site for all the latest fixes.
Write down the error messages as they appear and we will do our best to fix them.
In a worst case senario, you can repair/re-install 98se without too much trouble.

Regards

[garygjk]

Thanks for that, I did update Windows a few weeks ago, but I'll try Doc Watson and try to make a note of the error details - I'm sure they'll be more soon enough!

[Rob]

I agree 100%. Upgrading to Win XP on that PC would likely casue you more troubles then you are having now. Do what Alan suggested and we will see if we can see what is up with your pc.

[garygjk]

Well it didn't take long for an error to occur. I activated Doc Watson, as suggested, and this is the long entry -

The application overflowed its temporary memory area.

Module Name: KERNEL32.DLL
Description: Win32 Kernel core component
Version: 4.10.2222
Product: Microsoft(R) Windows(R) Operating System
Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation

Application Name: Explorer.exe
Description: Windows Explorer
Version: 4.72.3110.1
Product: Microsoft(R) Windows NT(R) Operating System
Manufacturer: Microsoft Corporation

At the time, I'd just disconnected from the Internet, I had WMP open but not playing anything, with My Documents and I think Find open as well. I clicked to close the Explorer page after disconnecting, got the error message that IExplore had caused a fault, then Dr Watson took the snapshot. Everything on the right had corner of my taskbar vanised, apart from sound and NIS2004.

It does seem to me that errors occur when I'm moving from one application to another, after I've shut one down a few seconds later I may get an error that it has caused a fault for example. Any ideas?

Gary

[Rob]

I would suggest that you disable Norton Internet Security for a limited basis and see if you still get these errors. I know NIS has caused errors in different configurations. I would still keep your antivirus running if it is a seperate app from NIS.

[garygjk]

I'll give it a go, disabling NIS when I'm offline. I did have big problems with my PC after I installed it last December and was seriously thinking about taking it off again, but they mostly seemed to have quietened down. I had been disabling NIS before when I wasn't using it, just seem to have gotten out of the habit lately, which is probably why the problems have recurred. NIS also triggered some odd things like losing Freecell and bugs with Solitaire, and not being able to check my Outlook inbox more than once while online without having to restart, otherwise I get a timeout error occurred message. Maybe off topic, but would a RAM memory upgrade help? I was looking into it last night when the last error occurred(!), and think it may be something I could manage to do.

Gary

[Rob]

More memory almost always helps. It wouldn't hurt to add another 64mb to see if you see a performance boost.

[outlook]

I have been using it. outlook express 6 problems and repair outlook express 6 more stable and secure than other programs.