AbstractGeneralized conjugate gradient methods are often used to solve large sparse non‐symmetric linear systems. Such systems often arise in the numerical solution of convection–diffusion problems. The Lanczos/Orthodir method proposed by Jea and Young suffers the roundoff error problem. In this paper a modified Lanczos/Orthodir method is considered. The modifications are based on Paige's computational procedure and on the adaptive restarting procedure. Numerical results showed that the modified Lanczos/Orthodir method is more stable than the original version. Furthermore, with the adaptive restarting scheme the method performed much better than the Lanczos/Orthomin met