Category: Windows

Windows 98……sigh

Mental note no 43 – setting up a pc with Windows 98 is now officially difficult and will induce a migraine that keeps you in bed for a few hours more than normal. Fact. After fixing a machine a few weeks ago the only thing left after the virus had done it’s stuff was a sick soundcard. I reckoned it would be best to start from scratch and re-install everything.

Everything went well until the last bit of hardware, the webcam. What a bugger. It works in one bit of the creative software but not in an other. Then Autocad wouldn’t install, Office 97 was screwed, Photoshop Album wouldn’t run etc etc etc. Nightmare.

I now officially have ‘The FEAR’ when re-installing old operating systems. The driver support for new hardware is shockingly bad, although it should be noted that it’s a Creative card and their support is not the best.

The good news is that I’ve finally met someone with almost the same sense of humour/banter that I have – it got very surreal when we could predict each others responses. Class!

Warning – Messenger Plus

For a while now I’ve been using Messenger Plus which is a nice addon to messenger for Windows. However today via a helpful automatic update it installed some nasty spyware and an obtrusive IE toolbar for some websearching firm which no matter how many times you switched it off, it would reappear. After a half hour of trying to gain control an uninstall of Messenger Plus had sorted it out.

I then ran an ad-aware scan which removed a further 130 (bloody hell) nasty spyware entries on my machine. You just can’t surf safely nowadays. Thats what I get for not using Firefox more, now my default browser.

PC Upgrade part 2

The pc upgrade is complete and I finally got round to doing a backup. And it worked!! One outcome of the upgrade was how slow XP took to shutdown (startup was fine). A quick Google found a great XP tips site – shutdown is only around 15 seconds now.

Only annoyance is how noisy my processor fan is. A Zalman Flower would solve it, although a motherboard upgrade and a new chip is far more tempting. As well as the flower.

PC Upgrade

Not posted for a while. The new disk for the pc arrived but as per usual the Windows re-install was far from smooth. XP has always worked fine but for some reason the install disk kept failing at certain files. Turns out the files were placeholders for future apps, but it was niggling all the same. Then some of my hardware wouldn’t work and the drivers, even though built into XP, wouldn’t install. Switch hard disks and the hardware was fine. Grrrrrrrrrr.

Had to mess big style with registry and also drop to safe mode and copy the drivers cab file over again. All pretty straight forward (except it took a couple of hours to get to this point) but if I was a novice I would be stuffed.

So 120gig drive works fine, and I gave into temptation and bought an external caddy for my old disk so that I have a good backup solution for the first time in years. Not that I’ve backed my data up yet…….