Question : Windows 98 SE, screen savers, and hard drive crashes

Greetings experts,

I had a harddrive in my IBM Aptiva with Windows 98 SE and 256Megs of RAM, and one day I happened to change the screensaver to that 3D Maze that turns upside down.  I left that screen saver running for about two days and my harddrive crashed - a total hardware failure.

I bought a new harddrive to replace it and chose Inside My Computer as the screensaver.  After about 4 days, the new harddrive hadn't crashed, but the computer was CRAWLING!!!!  I mean, you move the mouse and it took about 5 minutes to restore the desktop!

Are these just bizarre coincidences, or do I really need to be more careful what screen savers I choose, or better yet, turn the computer off if I'm not going to use it?

Thanks
Joe

Answer : Windows 98 SE, screen savers, and hard drive crashes

One more thought for the road, but first what seems to be a great unofficial support site for IBM Aptiva's:
http://members.aol.com/don5408/aptiva.html

I was wondering what processor was in yours, and whether it was old enough to have one of the Intel ones that was known to be flawed in the way it made some complicated calculations.  I can't recall specifics, but the "Inside Your Computer" screensaver does seem to have to do a lot of co-ordinate calculations judging from what I can see of the internal resources from a non-programmer's point of view.  Maybe it eventually freaks out after it is saturated with bad calculations, for want of better technical description.

In addition, it would also seem that some of the older Aptiva's DID ship with a soundcard/modem combo known as "MWAVE":
http://members.aol.com/don5408/win98/win98_and_mwave.html
http://members.aol.com/donnaskani/overclock.html
http://members.aol.com/don5408/sound_only.html

You may recall that I wondered about this previously and put forward a tentative theory that perhaps the Modem was trying to go to sleep in between beeps.
http://members.aol.com/don5408/uaskb/setuprr.html

Problems with the "MWave" combo card resulted in a long-running Class Action Suit Settlement for affected users:
http://members.aol.com/mbs1058/mwave/classact.html

I haven't read completely through that unofficial knowledgebase, but perhaps you will find clues there that could suggest BIOS/APM issue, Graphics, Audio/Modem, or driver issues:
http://members.aol.com/don5408/uaskb/

I would also do as nobus suggested a while back ie. Run a full system Memory Test as a matter of priority.

Bill