What Causes a Microsoft Windows 98 PC to Lock Up But Still Allow the Mouse to Move?

Video Transcript

"I'm Jonathan Ayres with Network for Success and today we're going to talk about what causes Microsoft Windows ninety-eight to freeze but the mouse still works. Well this is an interesting question because generally, and I mean most of the time what we find out with Microsoft Windows ninety-eight is that when the system freezes, in other words when the screen seems to freeze, the mouse always freezes. So what situation would cause the operating system to be frozen and the mouse to still work, so you could move your mouse around, your cursor would be there and you could click on things and you might or might not get a response when you click on something. Well the answer to this question really lies in how the operating system works, and the Microsoft operating system has two different areas that it really focuses on. One is what we call the hardware calls, in other words, if a piece of hardware is demanding something from that operating system, then that's what's known as a hardware call and the other are the software calls. The software calls would be anything that has to do with the interface or how you are moving through the computer programs. So in the case of a hardware freeze up, that mouse is going to freeze up. And you're not going to be able to move it, but in the case of a software freeze you could have a process running that has not finished running but it's taking up all of the processing time of the computer so the computer is completely preoccupied, but the mouse is still about to move around, it's got just enough memory for the mouse to be able to move around on the screen so it looks like it's okay, but you know, if anything is locked up beneath the mouse, you're not going to be able to complete anything anyway and you certainly can't work on your computer, you can't play games, you can't surf the internet, because the computer is basically frozen, which is at the core issue of what we're talking about here. And the issue is, when a computer freezes up whether some parts work or some don't, that problem has to be corrected. So the correct way to fix a problem of a Windows ninety-eight machine freezing up is to reboot the machine and if you can't reboot the machine through the keyboard and mouse, you're going to have to turn it off and let it sit for a little bit, turn it back on again and see if that corrects the problem."