11.21 FS98 crashes - hardware or software?

From FlightSim

Q:

FS98 CRASHES! HARDWARE OR SOFTWARE?

A:

When first got fs98 back in October, the program used to crash quite regularly. The usual symptoms would be that the program would freeze and the display would lock up (almost like a pause I guess). The only way to recover from this would be a CTRL + ALT + DEL . As non of my other applications had any problems, I blamed it on either the program or the vast quantity of add ons that I was accumulating.

A few weeks ago I upgraded my PC with a new motherboard and processor but used my existing memory. The upgrade did not go smoothly! Although everything appeared to work OK afterwards, windows was as unstable as hell and would usually crash after about five minutes. My first thoughts were that the windows installation itself was corrupted and so I tried reinstalling. That was a mistake as windows reported numerous errors during the installation. After eventually reinstalling windows the problems were exactly the same.

At this stage I decided to boot windows in safe mode to see if the problems were the same. Although I could get windows to boot in normal mode, IT WOULD NOT BOOT IN SAFE MODE and would hang after loading the himem.sys extended memory manager. All finally became clear after running Norton diagnostics for a while. One of my simms was giving unreliable reads. After a quick trip to the hardware store to replace the simm, I had no further problems and everything was ok.

The interesting point about this is that with the slower processor (P200), I did not have any of these problems. All my memory was 60ns EDO. But now I do not have any random fs98 crashes. The sim is completely stable. It appears that the problems were all being caused by one of the chips on the memory module, and the faster processor just amplified the problem.

So the moral is if fs98 (or any other application) crashes frequently, do not always blame the software - there could be a hardware gremlin lurking in there. BTW I highly recommend the Norton Utilities software suite for diagnostic and tuning purposes. Without it I would never have found the problem.

Kieran G. Flemming