Computer Woes

[JDoors]

So I get home from work Monday morning & start 'er up to pay the bills. No Windows. It chokes on the "starting Windows" prompt. Nothing I do fixes it so I run Quicken in Safe Mode, pay the bills and shut it down. For two days. I just don't want to deal with it.

I tried a bit today then just reinstalled Windows over itself. The note on my Windows Startup Disk (which Windows creates when you install/reinstall) says the last time I created one was on 5/24/05. So I made it an entire year without reinstalling. Sucks, but pretty good for creaky ol' Windows '98 I guess.

I worried a lot over some things that I needn't have, such as what I might lose. Once I got it running again everything looked identical to what it was before the problem. I apparently didn't lose any functionality. I was worried that the Setup would reinstall IE 2.0 (or whatever version came with my OEM Windows disks), or that my security software would no longer be integrated into Windows, but it all seems to work.

So far the only problem I've encountered is with Windows' Media Player, some old files were installed but when I ran WMP it automatically asked if I wanted to keep the newer files, and after some install time it ran normally.

Now if only I can get my external drive to run ... It died on me (along with all my backups, which is why I was so worried about the reinstall).

[Chappy]

Yah, repair installs work pretty darned good most times! I actually haven't seen a repair install fail yet, and trash the personal data on the drive, so it's a fairly safe thing to do.

I didn't know you were still W98 JDoors??

How come no upgrade to XP yet....hardware issues?

XP has matured beatifully into MS's most stable and relaible platform ever, and so far from what I've seen with Vista, I'm staying with XP!! All the good stuff they originally were going to go with in Longhorn/Vista, have been dropped out and now it's nothing more than a resource hogging, slower OS with eye candy and not worth the upgrade!!

Most folks are going to have to upgrade hardware to go with Vista, and as it's going right now, they'll be very disappointed if they do spend the money to do that and find they don't run half as well as they did with XP...

[TheTerrorist_75]

I have to concur with installing XP. I find that it runs much better on my 98SE setup than 98SE did. I hardly ever boot into the 98 drive anymore. I was planning on upgrading the hardware on this PC to dual boot XP and Vista, but now plan on building a new PC for that purpose and use this for 'nix.

[blim]

Great news, Jdoors, glad you got it fixed!

You can do a repair install on 98? I didn't know that, I thought the only option was a reformat/reinstall. Remembering that one incase the Possessed Gateway acts up again!!

I also love XP and hoping Vista keeps getting pushed back as we might have to buy another idiot box this Fall for Son. Can only imagine what the extra hardware for the extra eye candy is going to do to the price of computers!

Only kink about upgrading to XP is that it needs at LEAST 256 gigawatts of Ram and 512 is recommended, and I think there is a processor requirement, too.

Liz

[TheTerrorist_75]

Great news, Jdoors, glad you got it fixed!

You can do a repair install on 98? I didn't know that, I thought the only option was a reformat/reinstall. Remembering that one incase the Possessed Gateway acts up again!!

I also love XP and hoping Vista keeps getting pushed back as we might have to buy another idiot box this Fall for Son. Can only imagine what the extra hardware for the extra eye candy is going to do to the price of computers!

Only kink about upgrading to XP is that it needs at LEAST 256 gigawatts of Ram and 512 is recommended, and I think there is a processor requirement, too.

Liz

XP runs fine on my 2GHz AMD setup with 512MB of RAM. I have seen it run decent on an eMachine and Gateway with a 1GHz processor with 256MB of RAM. It all depends on how you set it up.

[Honda_Boy]

XP ran fine on my 800MHz PIII, 512MB RAM, GeForce2 MX400 gateway and even ran halfway decent on my 600MHz PIII, 384MB RAM, GeForce2 MX200 eMachine. Both are on 98se again though. I love going to office depot and seeing all those POS laptops say Vista Ready. No they ain't. They might can run it but my Compaq will run circles around them in Vista. (Athlon XP 2600, 1GB PC3200 RAM running at PC2100, GeForce 6600GT). Lord knows my Xplorer (Athlon 64 3500+, 1GB PC3200 RAM in Dual Channel, 2x EVGA GeForce 7600GT CO's in SLI) can tear through Vista but lord also knows it ain't findin it's way on here anytime soon as a primary OS. I might unhook my hard drives and put in the little 20gig and play with Vista on it for a few minutes some time in the next few weeks. It's funny that Vista is on the Compaq and not this one really. Heck my GeForce 7600GT boxes say built for windows Vista. Um not really considering Vista is supposed to be utilizing DX10 and the 7 series only supports DX9. Can't wait for the DX10 cards to come out. Maybe I'll have 2 8600GT's.

Edited August 18, 2006 by Honda_Boy

[JDoors]

No upgrade due to no money (back when I had some I was an upgradaholic). Besides, with software and feature bloat my 256M 750Mhz PIII is already slow as molasses, I sure don't need any additional OS overhead.

Performing a '9x "do-over" isn't intuitive, but it's possible. You'd THINK putting the original OEM install CD in the drive and booting from it would give you access to Windows' Setup, right? Nope, it says you already have an OS so bye-bye. Yeah, I knew that, thanks for nuttin.

Somewhere, somehow, you have to find the CORRECT program titled Setup.exe and run that. That sets up the OS on whatever you already have. I long ago transferred that and all the setup CAB file (compressed setup files) to my hard drive, so I (eventually) found and ran the proper Setup.exe. Takes close to half an hour to finish and you only lose a few customized settings. I was surprised it didn't mess up programs that maintain a lot of Windows Registry settings, I'd have thought I'd have to reinstall everything that modifies the Registry, but I didn't.

There's also an option to revert to a previously saved Registry. Windows '9x (by default) saves the registry each time is successfully starts and keeps five previous copies, so you'd think you could just revert to one of those, right? Well, you could, if you knew what to do, but it's not obvious. I did refigure that out and tried it but no dice, hence the complete reinstall over the old OS.

My only current regret is my "backups" were on that external hard drive which was only a year old -- and it died. Nothing too serious, just things I wish I had access to. For instance, I downloaded all the Windows '9x fixes from the Windows Update site so if I had to start from scratch I could update Windows even though MicroSoft has abandoned '9x. That's gone, and I don't have room on my internal drive to download them again. I also kept some documents on there like quotes, CD and DVD databases, but it's not like I ever HAD to have access to those, I just enjoyed them as a hobby -- and so far, they're gone.