If you bought cheap (which is also often the less expensive off-brand choice) memory, that could be part of your problem. As an example, one year I bought a machine to be used as a server from one of the area's favorite stores. (I'll keep the name to myself, because they could have just gotten a bad batch.) Included were two sticks of 128 MB. Well, it didn't take long for BackOffice Small Business Server to BSOD during the install. After a few tries I began to notice that what was dying was different almost every time.... the SCSI driver, the kernel, etc. Anyway, to make an agonizing story short, it turned out both sticks were bad.... but problems would only show up under specific circumstances (start Exchange Server, then SQL Server, but not the other way around, etc.). Once I tossed both sticks with a better known brand (from a different store) the server's been running just fine. Lee Behrens <originalmessage> Subject: Re: [TCLUG] Total OT: Playing games Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2001 17:26:36 -0500 From: "Stephen R. Wilcoxon" <wilcoxon at bridge.com> Actually, it seems to be anything over 256MB makes Win98 unhappy. I'm running Win98SE on one machine and just upped it to 384MB and now it is slower booting and pauses at random intervals for a short period (<1 sec). It also seems to cause MS Photo Editor (the one shipped with Office XP) to crash and immediately cause a BSOD at random points. Before anybody asks, I'm reasonably sure the memory is good. The post check and chkmem (dos program for checking memory) say good -- Norton Utilities says there is a problem, but I'm guessing something else isn't playing nice (I keep meaning to try Norton under Safe mode but haven't gotten around to it). </originalmessage>