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GE frame-6 gas turbine, Mark-V <I> screen freezes every three/four hours every day. I have purchased the new industrial computer P4/3.4GB/512MB DDRAM/80GB HD and loaded the site specific files and installed the GE Arcnet card (contemporary controls) and configured at IRQ 11 and changed in arcnet.dat file and <I> computer runs very well first day but next day screen starts freezes. I formated the HD and reloaded the software but problem same.

Can anyone tell me why this happening?

First question, has it frozen or has it lost Arcnet comms.

You haven't said how you unfreeze the screen. Do you re-boot the computer? Is it just the data that freezes or does the computer "hang" and not respond to any keyboard or mouse commands and needs to be hard rebooted to get it to re-start? It's really not clear if it's just the data on the screen that's freezing or if the whole computer is hanging/"freezing".

What do the LEDs on the ARCnet card do when the screen freezes?

Are there any error messages on the <C> LCC/SLCC display?

IDOS was basically written for specific versions of BIOS, and can exhibit the kinds of problems you are describing when the BIOS is not "compatible" with IDOS (really, it's IDOS that's not compatible with the BIOS).

This would be my guess at what's causing your problem. Personally, I've never had much luck running MS-DOS or IDOS on a P4-based PC. It's been my understanding that most BIOSes written for P4-based PCs allow the OS to directly access some of the peripherals and interrupts, and IDOS remaps some of the typical interrupts used an any PC. But that's just a guess.

There seems to be no way of determining if IDOS is compatible with a particular version of BIOS, until one tries it. Others on this forum have reported they have had some success with getting IDOS to run on P4-based PCs, but have been short on details.

One last thing to try would be the resolution of the display driver. It should be set to 640x480, 16 colors. I don't know how it would be done on a system using MS-DOS and IDOS, but there's probably some information in the literature that came with the PC. But it's probably a long shot.

Let us know the answers to the above questions and how your troubleshooting progresses.

Further tests have been carried out and here are the results:

* The screen freezes with the data on the screen and it’s not a lost Arcnet communication.
* When screen freezes “Invalid” error message does-not come on top right corner it stays normal.
* When screen freezes… keyboard and mouse not respond it’s like whole computer hang so we reboot the computer by reset button.
* There no error messages on the <C> display.
* Resolution of the display driver dos-not affect, the problem remains same.

Please note that I have tried with other hardware (PIII/66Mhz/128MBRAM/20GB HD) and I get the same problem, i.e. screen freezes.

The old GE computer is working perfectly but this new one creating problems.

Do you think it could be from Arcnet card setting I mean card IRQ with the hardware?

So any advice?