Need help with Win95 (Vanity)

[bt_dooftlook]

I have learned over a long-time here that there are many incredibly gifted folks who occasionally pass time here at FR; now I am in need of some help on a technology question.

[arthurus]

Does the person have indoor plumbing? He at least needs to upgrade to W2000. That’s where I am. I have used XP on other machines a lot and still prefer W2000, actually. I remember playing those games with W95back in the olden days and the Blue Screen of Death.

[TomGuy]

Tell your relative to cough up a couple hundred bucks and buy a new XP machine

PC's are cheap enough now that buying a more current one costs less than repairing an old one.

I kept telling a relative that. It finally sunk in. He was paying $100 plus for every service repair (which were things like installing a new modem).

Some of the reconditioned and recertified ones are around $300 with OS. The OS (usually WinXP) costs $125, so the pc actually only costs around $175. That's not bad at all. I have been considering buying one just to put some version of Linux on to play around with it.

[keat]

On the mother board there will be a small battery...

Bingo.

[VeniVidiVici]

Is this computer standalone or on a network.

((and what’s the battery got to do with anything?))

[Doohickey]

Holy crap, your relative is doing his billing on a computer that’s about the same age as my middle-schooler? What’s the name of his company so that I can make sure to avoid it?

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Have him backup all valuable data and wipe the hard drive then install Windows 98se.

With very littlke effort, one can obtain a copy easily and it is more robust and stable than Win95.

Plus it will run all programs that currently run on Win95 leaving all the problems you described in the dust.

Just a suggestion. Freepmail me if you like hints on where to get a copy of Win98se.

[PeterFinn]

Dell usually sells PCs for $400-$500 including flat panel monitors. Tough to beat that deal. You can’t even build your own that cheap.

[waynesa98]

win95 and 98 have a small program just like xp called msconfig. use that to do a diagnostic startup. I would bet its infested with some malware. do a google and download hijackthis. make sure the system has good anti-virus(avg from grisoft is free) and antispyware (spybot search and destroy, spywareblaster, and lavasoft’s ad-aware - all free and unlike antivirus the more the better)

when using msconfig you might want to start up in safe mode so that you don't have to deal with the normal boot issues he's having. press f8 just after the bios finishes.

[ChinaThreat]

I’m sure you expected 59999999 people to tell you to upgrade didn’t you?lol. I never cease to be amazed at the # of people willing to provide you with an answer to a question you didn’t ask.

Anyway, the most important thing you need to do is get a back up of the data off of the pc. You can try booting into safe mode

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/122051

If you get into safe mode, you can troubleshoot easier there. But my recommendation is to make a backup pronto. Boot into safe mode. Try to fix the problem. If you can’t fix the problem with someone’s help (you are probably not going to get useful advice here because we can’t interact with the PC ourselves), then take all of these people’s advice and get a new pc. Most importantly, get the data off of that artifact.

[bt_dooftlook]

I appreciate all the well meaning suggestions, but (don't laugh) his accounting package runs on MS-DOS...

We have backups of the data, but need to get the computer to boot properly...

[bt_dooftlook]

Oh, and it is not on a network, so malware infection risk is minimal...

[bt_dooftlook]

Thank you for the detailed response - I was very curious about the WordPerfect-hang problem!

[steveo]

2008... glad you could join us.

[AFPhys]

I still have a computer that I run W95 on. I believe that replacing the battery is the thing I would check first. It was my first thought, and I’m glad to see mad... beat me to the post.

I love how fast that machine boots up, and I do a lot of my quick note-taking on it, and then simply turn it off. Nice to have so little operating system overhead.

mnehrling’s “printer driver” suggestion is probably the solution to the WP situation, though.

[mad_as_he$$]

Probably so. What I did know about WP I lost years ago!!!

[bt_dooftlook]

Are you saying that the weak battery is causing the computer to try to change to DST? BTW, I unclicked ‘Automaticaly adjust for DST’ while in safe mode and rebooted - still got lock-up.

[mad_as_he$$]

Not necessarily but if the system is losing bios information because of the battery being weak that can cause erratic behavior. The clock is just something that gets shown to you. Most newer system have flash memory for the bios so the battery is not as important. Some very old low end systems depend on the battery for bios information retention. The other bios stuff may not become readily evident. On a system that is older it is probably not clear what may or not be evident to the user from the bios. I can tell you I have fixed several old systems with weird problems by replacing the battery.