Cannot un-suspend, long boot times

[Rob Mayercik]

Greetings all - just joined up and have a couple questions:

The machine in question: TP600 2645-45u (PII-300, 288MB ram, 12GB HDD, FASTMOTT CDRW/DVD combo). BIOS is at latest revision.

I recently installed the 12GB drive as an upgrade from the original 4.5GB drive (what it had when I bought it used) and installed Win98SE (original drive had Win98 First Edition, and I needed SE to use my wireless LAN card). I upgraded the BIOS before replacing the hard drive, and as far as I can remember, I had no issues from that.

Anyway, the computer runs fine, but there are two annoying behaviors that have popped up with running Win98SE that I would like to eliminate (or in the case of the first, understand):

1. During the boot sequence, the Windows splash screen appears, then disappears as is normal for the system, but then the thing sits for about 60 seconds or more on a screen that shows lines from my autoexec.bat and config.sys that executed prior to the splash screen appearing. After the aforementioned 60 or more seconds, bootup continues normally and the machine is completely usable. With the old HDD in place (running non-SE Win98, I would get a message that said "Hibernation file is present" which didn't seem to last as long. Hibernation is enabled in Windows on the new drive.

2. Since I built up the new drive, I have been unable to use the "suspend" feature - I can close the lid and get into suspend mode, but then when I reopen the lid, the machine never fully recovers. Hibernation mode behaves simlarly, but I'm not all that concerned about it - for what I do with this computer, I don't really need hibernation, but the ability to suspend by closing the lid does occasionally come in handy.

When I installed Win98 on the new drive, I did make the mistake of not forcing APM installation (forgot about it), and later applied a patch from the IBM site. Last night, I attempted reinstalling Win98SE over top of itself (this time using the APMINST.INF/APMINST.REG files), and still have no ability to resume from suspend mode. I even tried removing the Battery Maximiser and Power Management features, but that hasn't helped either.

If I have time tonight, I may attempt renaming C:\WINDOWS to something else to cause a more clean install, but I'm having my doubts as to whether that will work. If that doesn't work, I'm not sure what else to try other than a reformat and full reinstall.

Does anyone have any other suggestions I might want to try first?

Thanks,

Rob

[carbon_unit]

On my TP600 win 98SE install I noticed the same delay you described and it started when I installed the software for the IBM High Rate Wireless Lan card.
As for the suspend problem, I think 98SE has always had a problem with suspend and standby. I gave up on them years ago. I never seen any advantage to hibernation anyway it only saved 4 or 5 seconds over a full bootup.
Now I turn all that stuff off and just have the screen go off when I shut the lid.