Not sure if this is the right section for this. Move if necessary
Hey guys,
Just wanting to know if anyone has had a similar experience.
I have a FreeBSD 4.8 gateway machine with a dual boot win98/FreeBSD machine connected to it. When I'm in windows and playing a game, Diablo II or Star War battleground, everything will be fine for a while and then the computer will freeze. All I can do is hit the reset button to get it started again. I've also had this when the machine has been idle overnight and I start surfing.
Now I know win98 bearly scraps in under the banner of an operating system but it plays my games well. Any ideas what could be doing this? Could it be a dodgy network card, or is it just windows living up to its standard?
I haven't installed FreeBSD yet to see if it happens to it as well.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Could it be related to your DirectX drivers? Maybe you should update to the latest version if you don't already have it.
I guess this topic should be moved to ( Windows & DOS: Issues & Discussions ) 
By the way what is your Memory size ? Try to check your VM (Virtual memory as well), im not too sure on Windows OS (not an expert), but i believe the main problem consists of the Memory and the Virtual memory allocation for your system.
Just read my post again. Forgot to add the vital part. That will teach me for posting when I'm so tired!
Not only does my windows machine hang but so too does my FreeBSD gateway. So I've got two machines that freeze. I reset my win98 machine and then try to ssh into the FreeBSD box only to find that it has locked up too and I have to reset it.
Could this be related to the fact that I have a permenant ppp connection running?
Sorry for the half info in the original post.
Could it be a heat problem?
/Peter
you know this is probably unrelated and even offtopic, but maybe your loop back if being used by these games, maybe your lo isnt set up on the router ? i have a linksys dsl router, and god forbid if i try to access my website or any services running with the external IP address, i will lose all network and internet connectivity for about 2 hours. there is only one windows client on my network now, which will be gone shortly as soon as i get my dad switched to linux. with linux its no problem i just have to remember to make sure i set my hosts file up for the domain name to point to the internal IP address. i know windows can use a hosts file but i havnt taken the time to figure out where it goes. anyway, after all that maybe it is a network configuration problem? sorry if my post didnt help give any ideas.
norsk hedensk
No that is helpful. I wasn't aware of the possible loop back issue. I'm primarily a FreeBSD desktop user and this is my first forey into networking.
Last night I when I rebooted the gateway machine I could have sworn I saw it say that 32mbs of ram where ok, it's supposed to have 64mb! So I rebooted and it said 64mb. I opened the case up and took out the ram, two sticks of 32mb, and put in a 128mb. When I fired it up the machine began beeping. Turned it off and put one stick of the 32mb in. Started up and got the same result, a loud beeping. Turned it off took the 32mb out put the 128mb in the second slot, fired it up.....all went smoothly.
Upshot of this is I believe that the first slot that holds the ram is faulty. I'm now running it with the two 32mb in slot 2 & 3. I've been playing Diablo II which would normally hang within the first few minutes.
The next test will be that I will leave the machine connected to the net during the night with a few browsers open and see if it locks up.
Fingers crossed the mystery has been solved.
Oh yeah, forgot to mention.
The windows machine locked up after play Diablo II for a while, once I had exited the game that is, but the gateway was still working.
So it could be a couple of things happening here. One bad RAM slot and the loop back while playing games.
Only thing left to do is watch and wait I guess.
yeah bad memory can be the cause of ALOT of hard to pinpoint problems. for me if im having a problem, once ive gone through all the possible software problems, hardware then memory is usually the cause.
Well so far things are working. I've replaced the old Real Tek NIC with a 3Com Fast Ethernet XL and, well, things seem to be ok.
I'm going to "stress" the machine out a bit to make sure that there are no other issues.
After 3 days of uptime, surfing on the second machine and also playing games I'm convinced this has been sorted out.
I believe there were two issues involved.
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The network card was not supported by FreeBSD. (It was so outdated it had a BNC connector on it.)
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(I'm not sure this was affecting the network) I had a bad RAM slot on the motherboard.
Thanks for your help guys.
I love it when a plan comes together! 