Back when I was still learning how computers function and software and hardware was a little less mature, I encountered a variety of problems using it. Some of it could honestly be blamed on poor programs while the rest was mainly due to user stupidity. On the positive side, debugging and fixing my own problems was about the best way to learn about computers and trouble shooting skills. Most of the tribulations described here-in were with a Packard Bell running Windows 9x, so the specific problems and solutions are no longer really applicable. None the less, I still keep them around to remember the good old days.
explorer.exe was not working at the time I was experiencing this, but that is another story. Any site on the internet I looked at worked file. When I put the local file that was not working on my ISP's server, it also worked correctly. I had no clue where this problem came from and it still isn't fixed.
explorer.exe wasn't working. Anyway, I was looking to see if any files had changed, perhaps causing explorer to crash, so at a dos prompt and type 'dir /od' to sort by the date modified. I did that in the windows directory and it worked fine, only a couple of ini files had changed. But when I went to the \system directory and typed the exact same thing, the files came up in a seemingly random order. It would not sort them. The windows directory still sorted fine though when I tried it again. It just did not like sorting the \system directory. Go figure.
(Screen shot taken in an open dialog because explorer.exe wasn't working)
explorer.exe wasn't working. Now I will tell you what that really meant. I was installing something to try to get Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) to access databases, but that actually ended up breaking a lot of things. While I was rebooting the computer, I realized I had to go somewhere else. Since I didn't feel like waiting though the five minute boot up and shutdown, I just hit the power button halfway through. So either installing PWS or doing a hard shutdown on startup messed things up. Either way, the next time I turned it on I got a nice message saying explorer had crashed. No big deal, explorer had crashed many times before and the only real result is that system tray was just a little screwed up until you reboot, right? Not this time. Explorer had crashed while it was first being loaded, so after I hit OK, windows just sat there with nothing running. I think "oh crap". I restart once to see if it was a fluke, it wasn't. I booted into safe mode to see if it was a driver or something—still crashed. I ran scandisk to see if my hard drive was more screwed up than usual. Nothing major, only a few lost clusters. I really wanted to get back into windows, so I made up my own solution. I first tried putting 'run=command.com' in my win.ini to get a shell open, but I guess explorer processes that so nothing occurred. So what I did was make a program in turbo pascal which all it did was shell to dos. I then named it explorer.exe and put it in the windows directory, overwriting the copy which wasn't working. So basically I just replaced my shell. When I rebooted, windows started with a nice dos prompt instead of the crashing windows explorer. Not like this was a huge improvement though. I could navigate in windows through the dos prompt, but I still didn't know what was wrong. I used an open dialog box for windows explorer. Control Panel, Windows Explorer, and My computer didn't work because they are handled through explorer.exe. Despite this, I was able to use my computer pretty normally without a task bar, desktop, or start menu. I didn't know what the problem was or how to fix it. The message box said that explorer caused in error in explorer, so I would think that the actually file got screwed up, but the date the file was last changed was about 6 months ago, so I don't think that was the problem.
I bought a network card to use at a LAN parties so I would no longer have to borrow one, but my computer didn't like that. When I had my sound card, modem, and network card all in at once, my computer wouldn't boot. When I turned it on it would just hang. I messed around with some bios settings to try to fix it, but I think I broke it more (sorry it's blurry). Windows also still didn't like my sound card. It worked fine through DOS, but it would lock up Windows, meaning my computer was still mute. I gave up on trying to get my sound card working in that computer.
Well, those bad clusters spread to Office, so it would crash every time I tried to start Word or Excel. (Thank you Packard Bell for your high quality hard drives.) To try and remedy Office not starting, I did the time honored fix of reinstalling by clicking the little reinstall button that setup has. I guess so many people have screwed up Office that Microsoft made a button just for them. I thought the reinstall worked, but when I started Word it still crashed. Evidently, setup didn't copy one of the dll's, so I copied it manually. When I started Word, however, I got a very interesting interface, no menus! It was doing the same thing for Excel too. Guess its time to reinstall Office (again).
Well, this problem isn't really because of my computer. The people who made Drumbeat, or at least Install Shield, were responsible. I was installing the Drumbeat demo, and I noticed that the compression on the install program was not very good. The size of the install files was about 28MB, but the total installation size was reported as about 23MB. What did I spend that last 5MB downloading?
I bought the game Gangsters and got an interesting surprise after I installed it. The only button that worked on the opening screen was the exit button. After a little research on their site, I found out that there had been similar problems because of some copy protection they put in their CDs. It said I should send it back for a replacement. I really didn't want to send the CD across the US when they had already burned enough bad CDs to put a message on their website about it. I won't be buying another CD from them anytime soon. Luckily, the CD would work fine in my 4x CD-ROM, just not my 32x, so at least I had a work around. Oh ya, and who needs DVDs after you see what that disk held.
