Laptop wont power off on lockup

[Shemp]

I have an HP omnibook 900mhz with win98 256 meg ram. Occassionaly it locks
up and the only way I can shut it down is to pull the battery out;< What
is going bad on this thing??

SH

 

[Wayne Morgan]

Usually, holding the power button pressed for a few seconds (I've seen it
take up to 10 seconds) will shut it down.

 

[Smith]

Yeah, try holding down the power button. What are you doing when it locks
up?

Smith

 

[Shemp]

Thanks, it can lock up at anytime. Holding the power button doesnt work.
Ive tried for up to over 60 seconds;<. Pulling out the battery is the only
way.

sh

 

[Wayne Morgan]

In that case, there are a few likely choices.

1) Bad sector on the hard drive. Run Scandisk and do the Surface Check. The
surface check takes a while to run. To keep it from restarting everytime
something gets written to the drive, boot into DOS mode and run the DOS
version of Scandisk.

2) Something corrupted in the OS install. If it's been a few years, it may
be time for a reinstall. If you find #1, you can count on #2 being there
also.

3) A driver acting up.

4) A memory chip on its way out.

5) Just about any other hardware problem you can think of. If you get this
far, it may be very difficult to find.