Lockups

Lockups I’m running Win98, original, and I’ve been having lockups. Everything just stopps responding, and I am forced to flick the power switch. If winamp is playing, the music goes into an eternal two or three second loop. This started happening about a month ago, perhaps once or twice a week. I just shrugged it off, and figured I had too many apps going (I’m a convicted multitasker). So I’d reboot, run Norton disk docter, etc etc. Two weeks ago, or so, it started happening daily. I got worried, and did some minor searching. Nothing came up. Two days ago it happened again, and when I rebotted I got a registry error. Windows then went into an endless loop of booting, popping up a blue screen saying that a registry problem had been spotted and fixed, then rebooting. Occasionaly it would get to the desktop, and then pop up a box saying that something was wrong with the registry and it needed to reboot. After a while I got tired of doing that, so I ignored the windows box and just started looking for answers. The only program I couldn’t get to run was Norton Systemworks. I googled, and discovered Norton could be run off of the CD so I did that. Registry problems fixed, except that I got screwed with ooooold desktop settings, and several programs needed to be re-unlocked (dreamweaver, fomine messenger, winzip). Now I just had another freeze up. I’m sick of this, for the last two weeks it’s happened two, or three times a day. I’ve got my critical stuff backed up, and have had the chance to double backup, and get some other things off. So if it totally goes down the tube I won’t loose anything but seven months worth of mozilla bookmarks (should backup those too) and a fudging lot of misc files that come in handy now and then. …Things I’ve been debating on doing… - Reformat. Even though I won’t loose any data critical, I don’t want to do this because of all the other stuff I have. However, I have somehow managed to fill my 40 gig harddrive half full with crap I never use, so perhaps this could be a good thing. . . - Dual boot with Linux I’ve wanted Linux for ages, but the machine I was going to convert to a linux box simply doesn’t work. (I wouldn't have problems running something like Dreamweaver with WinE, right?) - Ignore it Windows will probably become more and more corrupted, until I end up loosing it all together, right? Has anyone gone though the same thing here? (Note, I physically have no copy of Linux, have not the money to buy a packaged version (in debt to parents by $500 now), nor the bandwidth to download it (56k’er) so if you could mail me CD-R’s of Linux I’d be happy. (Red Hat wanted, though Mandrake sounds good too) I could arrange for a PO Box if anyone would be that kind. ) /me goes to google for additional help [edited by - Katta on April 25, 2003 2:59:39 PM] [edited by - Katta on April 25, 2003 3:00:55 PM]