[comp.windows.ms] Windows lock up ...

pwilliam@fiver.axion.bt.co.uk (Philip Williams) (09/19/89)

Is there anyone out there who could give me some insight to the problems
I am having with MS Windows?

I am using a Zenith Supersport 286 with MS DOS 3.21. Mostly I use
Excel spreadsheet from windows 2.03. I am a non technical user.
Every now and again I ask Excel to change the fonts, or print
preview a large document and the egg timer comes up and nothing
happens, no disk accesses, noting. I have left it as long as 20
minutes before rebooting.
The mouse will move the timer round the
screen but thats all. Alt key stroke doesn't work either. Sometimes
it locks up with the cross cursor. The only way out is to reboot.

I suspected memory problems so noe I run Windows with nothing else
I experimeted with gaining access to the 1Mb memory of the
supersport and appear to have come across the emm.sys bug in
MS Dos 3.2. The hang ups continue.

Any help or advice would be much appreciated. Please mail me as
I am on vacation for the next four weeks and won't be able to read
the network. I will summerise and post anything interesting.

Thanks in advance etc.


Philip

 e-mail         pwilliams@axion.bt.co.uk (...mcvax!ukc!axion!pwilliams)
 'phone         UK + 473 642770

tat@pccuts.pcc.amdahl.com (Tom Thackrey) (09/21/89)

In article <2599@zaphod.axion.bt.co.uk> pwilliam@axion.bt.co.uk writes:
 >Is there anyone out there who could give me some insight to the problems
 >I am having with MS Windows?
 >
 >I am using a Zenith Supersport 286 with MS DOS 3.21. Mostly I use
 >Excel spreadsheet from windows 2.03. I am a non technical user.
 >Every now and again I ask Excel to change the fonts, or print
 >preview a large document and the egg timer comes up and nothing
 >happens, no disk accesses, noting. I have left it as long as 20
 >minutes before rebooting.
 >The mouse will move the timer round the
 >screen but thats all. Alt key stroke doesn't work either. Sometimes
 >it locks up with the cross cursor. The only way out is to reboot.
 >
I was having similar problems running pagmaker.  I changed my TEMP
environment variable to point to my hard disk instead of my ram-disk
and the problem went away.  My guess was that either pagemaker or the
spooler or both were unable to cope with running out of temp space.
I have not done the research to verify my theory, but my lock-up
problem is gone.