Fire up certain versions of Windows 95 on your new AMD K6-2 PC, and you will receive this cheery message: "Device IOS failed to initialize. Windows Protection Error. You must reboot your computer."

Rebooting the computer usually makes the problem go away. AMD says the error occurs only with 350MHz or faster processors, and is more likely to crop up on faster processors. It also turns up only under Windows 95 OSR2, OSR2.1, and OSR2.5 ù not with earlier versions of Windows 95, nor with Windows 98 or NT.

According to AMD, the error stems from the fact that Windows 95 OSR 2.x trips over the K6-2's processor frequency, and is not due to a flaw in the processor itself. Says Ivlynn Yap Cheng Theng, AMD's senior marcom executive for the South Asia Pacific region, the problem is "a manifestation of a high-performance, high frequency processor running on an operating system that was originally designed to run on earlier processor generations."

AMD tells us that Microsoft is developing a solution to the problem and a fix should soon be available at www.microsoft.com.