98SE/ teatimer implosion

[maddogk]

HELP !!

I'm new to the forums here (Hi all), but my computer ate itself last night:
I was happily playing an online game (SFC:OP) and exited out to post on a forums when a pop-up message says something about teatimer not responding and will exit- and the computer locks up. Ctrl-alt-del won't respond, the mouse doesn't move, enter key does nothing, and no drive activity, so I reluctantly switch off the power and wait a minute. When I power back up I see the windows boot screen then a blue screen saying something about wincfgm error and it reboots by itself- again and again. I finally get the machine to boot to a dos prompt and run scandisk thinking I have a HD error only to find no errors on the drive. At this point I can't boot to safe mode nor windows, only a dos prompt.

So now what do I do ??

I was planning on running 'scanreg /restore' tonight to revert to a previous reg save but I thought I'd check here first. I'm running 98se and S&D 1.4 (updated 2 weeks ago) with teatimer active.

Thanks in advance for help.

[chi-va]

Hi,

I would recommend to proceed as planned with 'scanreg /restore'. Please try to recover the last working registry.

[poppylove]

Hi,

I would recommend to proceed as planned with 'scanreg /restore'. Please try to recover the last working registry.


Yeah, but I wonder what caused the problem in the first place?

[chi-va]

No idea.:scratch: Does the system work again? I have a test sequence in mind which we will test in the experimental laboratory next week.

[maddogk]

Just a small update-

I backuped all the saved reg updates (in DOS) before trying to recover, but none of the backups worked so I unplugged all my hard drives and plugged in a fresh one to reinstall windows to, but the windows install crashed (XP SP2). So I proceed to strip my case to build up another PC with a new board only to find that with a new mobo and blank drive the XP install still crashes (it says 'page fault in a non-paged area'), so I suspect processor as I have new mobo, new HD, new memory.

I'm just a bit confused as to how teatimer picked up on the failure before windows locked up (nice feature as I'm sure my registry is still intact). So I'll rebuild the old system with a new CPU chip and try to reboot, I'll report back with my findings but at least I know it's NOT Spybot that killed my compy.