Hi Dan, I have actually got on the internet with the win98 computer, downloaded Everest to find my drivers and noticed the state of the state of the memory it says:- Physical Memory 255MB, Used Memory 166Mb and Free Memory 88MB will I have used all that memory?. Please also refer to my last 2 replies. Thanks

"... the state of the state of the memory it says:- Physical Memory 255MB, Used Memory 166Mb and Free Memory 88MB will I have used all that memory?."

Yes. Memory use will pretty well continuously fluctuate. Everest itself was using some of that to run.

Windows will use (almost) all it finds. Remember, everything is done in memory. ie; When you load a Word Document, the Word program AND the Word Document are loaded into memory, and everything is done there until you Save and Exit. Only then are the hard disk files touched. (Unless you have Auto-Save turned on, then the program will save/update the current file on the disk at the specified intervals.)

The heat factors were going to be next on my list of troubleshooting steps to go through. (Fatal Exception errors can be caused by bad (incorrect) drivers, bad memory, and CPU heat problems.) Congratulations on your initiatives.

I'd go back to the repair shop and demand they make the useless expenses right. If they sold you a video card that wasn't needed, I'd return the card and ask for reimbursement of the card and repair costs. A clogged CPU heatsink and fan is easily seen once inside, and it should have been cleaned as a matter of course. One of the first things a reputable repair shop does is blow out the system in a dust booth before they even plug it in. If it crashed within five minutes when you had it running, I don't see how "... he had left it running and it was alright..."

"... so I have just ran scandisk on thorough plus automatically fix errors and that went ok. so now i have a clean install is there anything else I should do"

If the system is now running OK, no.

Bad sectors will appear on a hard disk ~from time to time~. It's part of the natural course of a hard disks lifespan. If you notice that more are appearing frequently though (every disk check), I'd consider a new hard disk. When bad sectors appear in MBR or Boot file areas (boot files are ALWAYS placed in a specific area of a floppy or hard disk) you will get a "Disk Unusable" error.

Hi Dan, thank you so much for your considerable knowledge and time. I bought a memory card which i haven't installed yet, on Everest it says that my memory card is PC133 SDRAM which is what i asked for at PC WORLD but on the packet it says PC133 DIMM SDRAM is this the correct card?

That should be fine. DIMM is Dual In-Line Memory Module.

Hi Dan, Yes i'm back again like a bad penny, sorry no pun intended, installed the extra memory no problem and at the same time thinking about the heat factor installed an extra exhaust fan, everything seemed ok, I then downloaded kazaa and now i'm in a worse situation than ever, got an exception warning, thought ok it's from kazaa so i removed it, as soon as I did this I got the following fatals:-
0e at 0028:c1a20c1a in vxd dvp(01) 0006b3a, tried to restart computer and got 0028:e9f46000, then press any key and got od at0202:01478861 then press any key and got 0d at 16d7:014775e5. Please help if it is at all possible, thanks mate

If the above errors are with the new memory, remove it and install the old memory. Try to start and run Windows. If you still get these errors there's a good possibility it's the hard disk which is causing the problems.