How do YOU fix your windowz

Renton

Picture this common scenario:

Your Computer crashs during startup, wether it be a lockup, freeze, blue screen, etc

What do you do.

Im writing this post, to find out what kind of methods people use to diagnose problems of this sort.

Anyways, this is how I diagnose this.

Firstly, If its crashing on bootup, I go into safe mode and see if theres any yellow "?" beside any hardware, if so, disable the device and reboot. If no joy, or no yellow "?" , I then reboot and when it says

"Starting Windows 98..."

I press f8 to bring up the boot menu, and then create a bootlog.txt

Then i view the bootlog.txt, in dos (f8 -> Command prompt only) and find the offending device driver / link library, and then rename it and try to boot again.

I Also (in 98) use "sfc.exe" and "msconfig.exe" ...

No flames plz, just give your oppinions

Thanks

RentZ

Kali

Had my pc for 2 years now with 98SE.. no need for a reinstall or even Safe Mode yet, even with several different OSs having shared the disk at times.

Compare that with 95 which I had on the previous computer for 3 years, 6/7 reinstalls in that time.

Its beyond me why people say 98 sucks

PiE

It's not Windows that sucks. It's what people do with it that fugs it up.

On the topic, my usual is answer is a swift kick and a shutdown. To ALL problems.

But then again I'm on a PC that I couldn't sell for scrap if I wanted to so it's cool

Bard

I use Windows 2000, so there's nothing to fix

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Bard

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"We do know it was we who scorched the sky..."

JustHalf

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by PiE:
It's not Windows that sucks. It's what people do with it that fugs it up.</font>

Exactly. Like install applications and uninstall them. The dastardly divils!

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It rained in San Francisco Wednesday evening, but the penguins were
still there Thursday morning, smiling broadly.

Kali

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Bard:
I use Windows 2000, so there's nothing to fix
</font>

hehe see Hobbes' thread

Renton

But back to the point.

About fixing 98

?

chernobyl

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">

Compare that with 95 which I had on the previous computer for 3 years, 6/7 reinstalls in that time.

Its beyond me why people say 98 sucks [/B]</font>

Clean install maybe every 2 months here, could be 98/ME/2K/XP.

smoke.me.a.kipper

thats the way i go too. i always back everything i have onto cdr. then every month or so, it's into dos for a quick format c:

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"It is hard enough to remember my opinions, without also remembering my reasons for them!"
-Nietzsche

Gerry

even if win98 survives a long time, it gets clogged up, and runs slower and slower. I've had this win2k install for about 8 months now, still runs grand. Win98 is just annoying, it often messes up of its own accord. As for diagnosing problems, yes safe mode is good. Also restoring an older registry can be helpful also, though it will set the machine back a bit.

In my experience, display drivers and ide drivers cause the most problems with windows, and I would be careful before installing new versions of these. i.e. wait and see what the general consensus is before jumping in and mucking up your system.

satchmo

A lot of swearing and a re-install usually does it for me.

azezil

www.fixwindows.com has some nicely laid out steps!

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"just because ur not paraniod, doesn't mean they're not after u!"

Da Bounca

i keep turning it off and on till it works again.

WhiteWashMan

Originally posted by JustHalf
Exactly. Like install applications and uninstall them. The dastardly divils!

---

It rained in San Francisco Wednesday evening, but the penguins were
still there Thursday morning, smiling broadly.

ahahahaha! yep, i know the ones youre on about. imagine wanting to do stuff with your pc. tut!

anyway, just boot up in safe mode and undo whatever you did.
and dont say you didnt do anything, coz i know oyu did....

and then install win2k. gwan the bard, sure when did you get technical

sutty

in 98 I often found that it was .vxd files causing probs, just removing them seamed to work. How ever....in 98 I often found a reinstall would be better.

JustHalf

I ownerz m4 windowz with l33t sp34k.

Can you change the title of a thread in vBulletin?

Hobbes

Originally posted by Kali


hehe see Hobbes' thread

Is that the KMODE one? I have managed to destroy two machines using W2K. I'm not talking about lockup, I'm talking about having to completly repartition the drives and reinstall from scratch to get anything to work again.

Oh and one machine had an issue with hardware.

Other then that I would say W2K Professional is more stable anything else out there in the Windoze market. Providing you do a clean install and don't overlay it over some ****e like W98.

Praetorian

I use Norton ghost quite a lot with WIN98 / WINME machines.

OK WHAT I DO: Clean install bringing drivers etc upto date ie latest spec

Any minor problems, basicly I just use the old process of elimination routine :P (similar to rentons)

major problem i backup any downloads etc etc then reghost from optimum ghost setup

although sometimes the easiest / quickest solution can be just installing the os over the original using a custom batch file/oem quick install (ie no human interaction)

if there is still a problem after ghosting then there must be a hard ware fault or it could be conflict after a bios update (that happened to me once) LOL

then its just a matter of process of elimination with the hard ware

BUT NOW

Ive got winxp so what problems ??? NONE!

Straker

If either W9X, or W2k, dies on me... I just reinstall my favourite "images". Simple

OSiriS

When I originally got my machine, after the 1st re-install I set my machine up so I would only have to back up a few folders on the c drive (favourites, desktop, fonts, my documents) and then format and re-install, within about 2 hours I could have everything important back on, and put the rest back over time. This worked out very well as I had to reinstall 98 about every month or 2, mainly because it wouldnt handle new hardware for some reason.

Since 98se came out i have only re-installed twice .. the 1st to clear the registry and system folder, and the second because I got a new h/d and wanted to keep the original as a backup. I have had win2k installed as dual boot with 98se since i got it nearly 2 years ago and never needed to reinstall it, and apart from a few difficulties with ports I havent had a complaint.

If and when I do run into problems, and it does happen, I just systematically check everything I can think of, but since there are so many variables it would be difficult to list them all. It mainly involves checking Bois settings, hardware conflicts, viruses, data corruption, but these days it rarely takes more than 10-15 mins to sort any problem with my own machine ... other ppls are a different matter:)

Typedef

come on 2k is stable for windows but by *nix standards it's crap yeah?

I mean if X-Windows locked up (which even if it did it's not dependant on one program) like explorer yeah? Then all you do is take it back to the command line ( no reboot) and just restart the gui -not the whole os yeah? I mean in windows if explorer crashes, and gets restarted the changes are that lots of your intergrated shell components didn't get restarted so if you want them back that means an eventual reboot right? In a unix X-Windows enviroment there must be at least three seperate programs for the explorer function (give or take) so if one crashes then it's no big deal not like (billblows) catch my drift?

Seriously though there is next to no legitimate reason to format or install eh I mean reinsall windows heh , I mean if you have some muppet programmer has overwritten your os' dll's then all you need to do is extract them from dos yeah?

If you have some ghost driver in safe mode that can't be deleted then thats what regedit is for yeah? And if you fsck up your registry then that is why they have system.001 user.001 or whatever yeah? So most windows problems (apparently) come from stupid users or just the terrible design (or lack of design) that went into the os IMHO ok?

I mean imagine a server that locks up so badly that it needs to be rebooted because you took out a floppy disk or a cd rom(nt4 will crash like this with a cdrom or floppy I dunno if you've seen nt4 crash like that but, it's pathetic yeah?) , as opposed to LINUX which might print a kernel message to some obscure file somewhere that you would probably have to delibrately look for yeah? That's it no blue screen - no lock up - no back doors etc......?


The best fix for windows is to format it and put linux on in it's place yeah?

"but, not about the case , about yourself"

Renton

WEH Dabounca ya big fecker ya.

SantaHoe

Depends on the type of crash, and when it happens....
But generaly I think you've got it sorted with the steps you mentioned above.
I find restoring CMOS defaults can help if you're getting black-screened before the GUI loads.
If all else fails - a lifesaver is scanreg /restore from a dos prompt... lets you restore any older registry files from the last few (hopefully working) reg backups.

Again, heavily depends on the circumstances... if you get no POST, or no signs of power-up - strip unneccisary system components (one at a time) that might be causing trouble, see if it loads ok... if not, move on to the next bit of hardware.... and keep going until you're bare... re-seat everything... etc
(gotta love getting those calls btw, sit back and have a snooze while customer x wrestles with getting the case off)

Hobbes

>come on 2k is stable for windows but by *nix standards it's crap yeah?

No it's pretty stable even by *nix standards.

>I mean if X-Windows locked up

Yep, love that. Just CTRL-F1, log in and restart X-Windows and CTRL-F7 and I'm back again. Of course that is a serious crash which is rare as well.

>I mean in windows if explorer crashes,

W2K for crashing I find is pretty stable. If Explorer crashes you just restart it. You can still have other processes running and it's easy to manage services/tasks easier then you ever could in W9X.

>that means an eventual reboot right?

Again it really depends on what your messing around with. I have had a serious crash on W2K that nothing would run, but I was able to restart everything without having to reboot and other services which I needed to keep running did.

A lot of the "Reboot your computer" messages in window are legacy messages. Takes services for example, lots of programs force you to reboot to start a service but it can be easily done by hand.

adnans

you give it a good kick, restart, and pray it works. if it doesnt, undo the last thing you did before it fúcked up.

adnans

Dr. Loon

My PC's fooked at the moment. Adnans you know the score there... I've to backup fúck loads of data before I can begin to sort it, so currently my solution is to scream like a maniac and hit the infernal machine.

I think I'm gonna go along the path of making and image, and then just looking after it properly... I just don't have time at the moment... so my system gets run down. i also need to get a replacement modem from Gateway. I might just install 2k.

If in doubt... scream like a mad man, and hit, not too hard, but you want to give it a good satisfying smack!!