Somtimes himem.sys missing / corrupt

[E.k]

My PC almost always never boots first go.
I get: "himem.sys is missing or corrupt. Press alt+ctrl+del to restart"
And after about 5 or so resets, it'll boot perfectly...

I got this PC off my uncle & it had this problem. I formatted & deleted the primary partition, made a new one & done a fresh install of Win98. I consider myself fairly technical, but I havn't seen a computer that only doesnt work -somtimes- with a boot problem like this.

Could it have something to do with my config.sys?

Any help would be greatly appreciated! ;)

[Bad Dog]

Why do you need autoexec.bat or config.sys? Are you booting some dos programs? Norton? I have W98Fe without these files.
Do you have this prob if you use a startup disk to boot a few times?
If when booting from a known working bootable diskette you encounter a himem.sys error it is likely that your computer has a physical memory or related hardware issue causing this error. (Mobo, memory, etc.)
If you have more than one memory module, remove one and then the others one at a time and see if prob persists.
Good luck.
BD:disgust: