Powerpoint freezes computer

[Colin]

I have a Pentium 3 with 128 meg ram with Windows 98SE and Office 97.
I work on PowerPoint almost every day for a couple hours
intermittently. Somewhere in the course of the day, upon closing
PowerPoint, the pc will freeze really hard, and the only option is to
pull the power cord. With help, I have checked for viruses (none),
removed adware, removed a screen saver and other unneeded programs,
and reinstalled Office97. The problem still exists. The only thing
I've seen is that Norton WinDoctor reports errors in the ActiveX/COM
portion of the registry after I have been websurfing, but this may not
be related. Does anyone have any ideas as to why this is happening
and/or how to prevent it ? I use Powerpoint extensively for my
business and would be thrilled to have it working properly.
Any ideas appreciated

Colin

 

[John O]

Virus scanners and Norton sometimes cause a lot of trouble, and Win 98
itself is quite touchy. Put all three on the same box, and stuff happens.

If PowerPoint is critical to your business, then you should consider a
better operating system. Win 2000 SP-3 is possibly the most stable Windows
OS ever. XP ain't bad either, but you have to switch off that teletubby
interface first.

Bottom line: Win 2k and XP don't crash because of software. Once installed
properly (no OS upgrades, please!) on solid hardware, you'll wonder why you
didn't switch sooner. You could probably add 512M of RAM for $50, a 160 GB
HDD for ~$100, and you have all the hardware you need.