Will Rickards
Storage Is My Life
Warning: sort of mindless ramble follows mostly to document what the heck I'm going to do for my own benefit. No real tech support issue as I can handle it but advice is welcome.
So my dad's computer has been shut off the not so nice way too many times or something. It has windows 98, mostly because he has some games that are windows 98 only. The reason it is being shut off is that the monitor doesn't come back on after sleeping. It's my old 17" monitor and I can attest that it is tired and doesn't like to wake from the sleep state. But turning it off and then on seemed to solve the problem for me.
He's going to buy a 17" LCD soon.
Anyway, it came up with a windows protection error.
I tried step by step confirmation and disabling the weird named vxds, no go.
I tried msconfig and selective startup, no go.
I tried system file checker but it report just about every file. Seems it had the original 98 version information and not update 98 with all the patches. So there were so many false positives it was useless.
A scandisk revealed some bad sectors in the unused portion of the disk (only 6 out of 60GB is used).
So I say time for windows XP.
They ordered it.
I'm going to install it.
I'm thinking fresh install would be best. Then bring over their settings for firefox and all. But then they might lose office and such.
So I'm thinking a new hard drive for their new OS and leaving the old drive alone so they could dual boot. But the 98 system isn't working. But once XP is working and all their stuff is there I can reinstall 98 I think.
Is there some secret to figuring out what causes the windows protection error? Some log file I should be looking at?
I'm hoping a nice $40 hard drive sale after rebate happens this weekend on something worthwhile (not WD).
Any other advice?
I'm so glad they are going to windows XP. Dealing with this lone win98 box to support has been crappy. Nod32 doesn't work quite right on 98 systems and I had ZoneAlarm on there which was an old version because each new one bring a new set of bugs.
In case anyone cares this is a gigabyte board (not sure what one) and an AMD Athlon 1800+ with 512MB of ram and some super duper dust bunnies.
Reminder: bring dust mask and can of compressed air.
So my dad's computer has been shut off the not so nice way too many times or something. It has windows 98, mostly because he has some games that are windows 98 only. The reason it is being shut off is that the monitor doesn't come back on after sleeping. It's my old 17" monitor and I can attest that it is tired and doesn't like to wake from the sleep state. But turning it off and then on seemed to solve the problem for me.
He's going to buy a 17" LCD soon.
Anyway, it came up with a windows protection error.
I tried step by step confirmation and disabling the weird named vxds, no go.
I tried msconfig and selective startup, no go.
I tried system file checker but it report just about every file. Seems it had the original 98 version information and not update 98 with all the patches. So there were so many false positives it was useless.
A scandisk revealed some bad sectors in the unused portion of the disk (only 6 out of 60GB is used).
So I say time for windows XP.
They ordered it.
I'm going to install it.
I'm thinking fresh install would be best. Then bring over their settings for firefox and all. But then they might lose office and such.
So I'm thinking a new hard drive for their new OS and leaving the old drive alone so they could dual boot. But the 98 system isn't working. But once XP is working and all their stuff is there I can reinstall 98 I think.
Is there some secret to figuring out what causes the windows protection error? Some log file I should be looking at?
I'm hoping a nice $40 hard drive sale after rebate happens this weekend on something worthwhile (not WD).
Any other advice?
I'm so glad they are going to windows XP. Dealing with this lone win98 box to support has been crappy. Nod32 doesn't work quite right on 98 systems and I had ZoneAlarm on there which was an old version because each new one bring a new set of bugs.
In case anyone cares this is a gigabyte board (not sure what one) and an AMD Athlon 1800+ with 512MB of ram and some super duper dust bunnies.
Reminder: bring dust mask and can of compressed air.
