Access 97 hang ups

[Abay]

Access frequently hangs up, goes into never never land, and I have no idea
what is the cause of the problem.

I have a win98 system with a Trinitron Multiscan 210gs Sony monitor. I am
currently running with 92% free memory and it still got hung up just now.
It doesn't matter what I am doing in Access, building reports, screens etc.
it still hangs. Its funny I can be in access for maybe 1 - 2hrs before it
happens, and once it happens it keeps hanging up a few minutes after I
re-boot .. have to do a hard boot also. I can run on a win95 system with no
problem .. its an old gateway system and just chugs along, however I need
to run it on the win98 system.

Does anyone know if there is a fix for this problem.

Any help would be much appreciated and maybe keep some hair on my head ..
not much left now after all that pulling ....

ebay

 

[Allen Browne]

This can be hard to track down, because there are many possible issues here.
Here's a couple of ideas.

A97 keeps polling Windows to see if any CPU cycles are free, and if so it
uses them. A CPU usage meter then shows almost 100% usage for A97, which is
not typical of other software, nor of later versions of Access. The upshot
is that if the system cooling is borderline, the machine can overheat using
A97. You may be able to test this idea by removing the sides of your
computer's case and seeing if the problem ceases. Some motherboards will
also give you a CPU temperature reading.

If that is not the issue, stop every other piece of software that is not
essential - email, screen saver, anti-virus, ... In fact, boot the computer
into safe mode to ensure no other software is running, and you are using
vanilla VGA drivers. Access will be slow in this mode (because drive
accesses are slow), but if you can run for a day without crashing, then you
have identified the problem as either drivers or some of the other software
you have running.

Before doing either of the able, be sure to clean out all unnecessary files
from c:\windows\temp, remove any .ldb files left over from the crashes, and
run a scandisk so you know there is no logical problem with the drive. These
things should be standard practice after any crash/hang-up under Windows 9x.

 

[Larry Daugherty]

I doubt that you'll get good system or hardware diagnostics in here.
You'd need to try an OS ng or ??

FWIW I have a W98 system that started acting flaky about 5 - 6 months
ago. My impression is that memory management in the OS has been
clobbered. The problem surfaced soon after one of MSs security
patches. I've kept the current and I've noticed system behavior
change, sometimes it even works the other way and a problem that had
surfaced just goes away. This one has persisted. Even if MS
acknowledges the problem I'm sure that fixing something that only
affects older OS's will be way down the priority list.

HTH

 

[Abay]

Many thanks, what you say of course makes perfect sense .. have done the
boot up test with nothing else in memory and run a scan, so think the over
heating may be the problem .. will remove the sides to the casing and try
that.

Thanks again,
abay

 

[Abay]

I agree with you that there is no chance of MS fixing an older OS problem!

Thanks for your reply,

abay