Hi all,

I have had an old Medion PC that I reactivated a few days ago. I swapped the original PSU with a corsair VS350 because it was making a terrible noise and I didn't trust it any longer.
The SR440BX comes with onboard SoundBlaster Audio PCI 64V and Onboard Riva TNT Graphics. I did have to search the net for a while before finding suitable drivers to be honest,
because one cannot download the original drivers from Intel or Medion anymore. Most of the stuff is getting recognized by windows 98 already, but not the Sound and Graphics part.
So for sound I was able to find a sounddriver from Dell: It apparently shipped with Dell Systems at the time. I put the link here just in case someone might need it:
https://www.dell.com/support/home/de-de/drive … driverid=r20634 Driver installed just fine and works well, also in DOS.
I only later found out that there is this cool vogons drivers site: http://vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=370&menustate=0
Drivers from there also worked well in win98 but the soundchip was not recognized in DOS. I checked the system variables
and there was no 'BLASTER' entry. Maybe I didn't check something during the installation and probably setting IRQ, DMA and Port manually would work (not an DOS expert here,
trying to get better, though). Graphics from the nvidia website for the TNT just caused a lot of problems. So I got the drivers from google (don't have the link available atm but I could find it again
if someone is in need). That driver did the job and all is good. Well, almost...

The system runs fine. 3D Mark 99 runs just fine, games run well, and everything else is working perfectly fine. However, when I was playing a game and paused it to do something else for a while and came back,
the system appeared to be frozen. The machine did not react to any input, the screen was just frozen. Had to hard reboot. Then the problem disappeared for a while and
not it freezes during screensavers. I am running this fishtank screensaver (my version is in german, I don't know the correct name in english, forgive me). And after a while of fishes swimming across the same thing
would happen. Sometimes it freezes after a few minutes, sometimes not at all for a long time, but it keeps coming.

I tried the following: I disabled the onboard VGA chip and installed a PCI graphics card (Rendition V2100, cool card btw.), I tried different sounddrivers and no sound drivers at all. I disabled power management in
Windows (like to go to sleep) and also in the BIOS. I swapped tha RAM, I tried different RAM banks. Memtest86 ran through without any errors.
Now that I am writing this, I think I might swap back in the old PSU, not sure if the problem was there with this one.
The only thing that is persistant is the fact that it only freezes during "idle", that is the machine is not receiving any input for a while. I also checked the capacitors on the mainboard. They were never swapped but
they look absolutely fine.

I also don't think that it is a heating issue since I was able to play demanding (well, for a TNT at least) games for a loooong time without problems.

Well, I'll try to swap the PSU and see what happens. But if any of you have any other idea, please let me know. It would be a shame to throw away this machine. It is a 400MHz Pentium II btw. and
programs like Photoshop 7 and Visual C++ 6 run just fine. It is actually surprisingly usable.

Okay, enough for now.
Happy new year everyone and stay healthy.