From: buhr@umanitoba.ca (Kevin Andrew Buhr)
Subject: Re: OS/2 2.1 Beta: Bugs and Comments
Organization: University of Manitoba, Canada
Date: Sun, 3 Jan 1993 00:30:51 GMT

In article <47886@ogicse.ogi.edu> francis@ese.ogi.edu (Francis Moraes) writes:

|  What is _it_?  A complete system crash, which happens pretty much any time,
|  doing pretty much anything. Here are the details:
|
|	   Location: ##0160:fff60967 - oood:9967.60000, 9084
|
|	   038600d1
|	   Internal revision 6.479, 92/12/09

This is very likely a problem with flaky memory.  It probably showed
up when you started using the beta simply because before that you were
lucky with which particular byte of which particular program was or
wasn't affected.  Since I began running Netware, TCP/IP, and seamless
Windows programs at once, for example, I had three crashes like yours
in a very short span of time, even though I'd never had one before
(running any of those components separately).

My solution was to flip the banks of SIMMS--my motherboard had eight
slots, four cards per bank, so I just reversed them all back to
front--and I haven't had it crash again.  This is either because the
SIMMS were okay and there was just a bad connection which was fixed
when I swapped them or because the bad memory is no longer having an
effect in the new card order.

Try doing the same sort of thing.  Also, try cleaning the contacts of
your memory boards with something like rubbing alcohol.  Be careful to
ground yourself before you handle memory, since even a small static
charge can wreck it.

If you still have trouble, see if your computer came with any memory
test software.  (The test will probably have to be quite rigorous to
duplicate the kind of stress OS/2 places on memory.)  If you know a
friendly computer technician, see if he or she will give your memory a
vigorous workout.  If he or she finds a problem, your memory may still
be under warranty (many come with a 1 year warranty against these
kinds of defects).

|	   DELL 325D, 12 MB ram, 80 MB Hard Disk with 14 MB free
                      ^^^^^^^^^

Do you have two banks of different speeds or types of memory?  IBM has
strongly suggested that OS/2 users not mix memory of different types
since this seems to cause a lot of failures when the memory is worked
hard.  You may want to consider upgrading the 4 MB bank to an 8 MB
bank of the same type as your other bank (assuming your current
configuration is a bank of 8 and a bank of 4) if you have the cash.
Not only will this probably solve your problem, but OS/2 runs a lot
nicer in 16 MB and none of the memory banks will be worked quite as
hard.  Be sure to match the memory speed.  Preferably, get exactly the
same model.

|  This crashing business continues, even without the network software loaded.

If you have a friend with compatible SIMMS, try borrowing them to use
in your machine.  This will settle the business of whether this is or
isn't an OS/2 problem.

As a last resort, try removing your 8 MB bank and starting a couple of
DOS applications and a WIN-OS/2 session.  It'll be very slow, but
it'll probably work.  Then try removing the 4 MB bank and doing the
same thing with the 8 MB bank.  If you crash under one configuration
but not the other then you've certainly narrowed it down.  If you
crash under neither configuration, it's a problem with mismatched
memory speeds.  Finally, if you crash under both, you are either the
extremely unlucky owner of two bad banks of memory, or you've found a
very strange bug in the beta.

|  At boot, I get the following message:
|
|	   SYS1201: The device driver "C:/OS2/MDOS/VSVGA.SYS" specified in
|	   the IFS command on line 101 of the CONFIG.SYS file was not
|	   installed. Line 101 is ignored.

For one thing, I would change all the forward slashes in your file
names to backward slashes....  or is this what you meant?  ;)

Why not try posting your entire CONFIG.SYS file?  This might help
narrow down the problem.

|  PMX cannot be killed (or _is_ not anyway) after a SHUTDOWN command. So
|  I have to kill it manually. After I kill it, the SHUTDOWN command
|  continues (!) and shuts the computer down the rest of the way. This is
|  very strange, since it _appears_ that the SHUTDOWN command had
|  stopped.

Hmmmm.  I had this problem with the original GA (without even the
service pack) at another site.  It isn't all that strange, though.
The way the OS/2 shutdown procedure is designed, any program can
prevent the shutdown from completing.  Evidently, PMX is doing
something rude with the shutdown request.  While this may be
irritating, there's nothing wrong with doing a Ctrl-Alt-Del after a
reasonable length of time (say 15 seconds without disk activity).

|  NOTE: I decided to re-install my network software when I originally had
|  problems. This then required that I re-install the CSDs for the network
|  software. Unfortunately, the PMX CSD will _not_ install; it crashes the
|  system at the same place every time. Still, I believe that these things
|  (Bugs three and four) are with OS/2 2.1 since the problems I had before
|  (using PMX with OS/2 2.0) were quite different.

Well...  It isn't necessarly an OS/2 2.1 bug.  A buggy application may
work under version 2.0 + SP and not under future versions if the
programmer did something silly that just *happened* to work with that
particular version of the operating system.  The PMX CSD might very
well fix your problems, especially since one of them is obviously
focus-related.

Good luck.

Kevin <buhr@ccu.UManitoba.CA>
Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.misc