On 23 Jun 2002, at 6:43, Michael Edwards wrote:
> [David W. Fenton:]
>
> >As to Win95 crashing, well, what do you mean?
>
> Well, different things on different occasions. Sometimes WordPad or
> Outlook Express or (most of all) Internet Explorer crashes ("illegal operation"
> message). Internet Explorer is terrible like that, especially if you try to
> delete items you don't want from the Internet History.
Well, then that's not Win95 crashing, is it?
> I have a word-processor, a DOS program called XyWrite, which sometimes
> seems to freeze the DOS screen it's in when I try to exit it; I can terminate it
> from within Windows, though, if I Alt-Tab out of it first. I'm not sure if
> that's related, or purely a XyWrite problem. It *is* related to whether I run
> XyWrite in 25-line mode or 50-line mode.
Then that's not Win95 crashing, is it?
> Sometimes the whole computer just freezes with a message about "kernel 32"
> or something; it offers me the choice of ignoring it and continuing to work, but
> in fact the whole computer is frozen, and I can't even enter an answer to the
> question.
That is a crash of Win95, the only one of your examples that is.
All the others are crashes of programs running in Win95, and changing to
a newer version of Windows might or might not reduce the number of such
crashes.
> I think lack of disk space is the cause of at least some of these problems.
> But fixing it will be involved, and discussing it here would probably take us
> too far off topic.
Lack of disk space should not cause programs to crash. It might cause
them to tell you that they don't have enough memory, but the programs, if
properly written, should not crash because of a mere lack of disk space.
> >The OS locks up? In what circumstances?
>
> I can't identify all the circumstances, but one is that I've tried to open
> too many programs at once. Maybe also running Windows too long before rebooting
> makes problems more likely.
> And also the disk space problem probably figures. The disk space actually
> seems to fluctuate, but it can run out entirely sometimes for a while, then some
> gets released again.
Yes, because the amount of disk space used is related to the amount of
swap space being used when RAM runs out. The more programs you load, the
more swap space on disk will be needed to swap programs out of memory
into the swap file.
> >You also might consider a fresh install of Windows, which will clean all the
> >crud out of the registry and improve reliability immensely.
>
> The problem is I've got stuff I don't want to lose, such as history of
> Internet sites visited, and maybe other stuff, too. I don't know any way of
> saving that, and if I reinstall, I'll lose the lot, as well as configuration
> settings for various things which would be a real headache to do all over again.
> This has been keeping me from doing anything like reinstalling for quite a long
> time (a few years, in fact).
> Is there any way of preserving things such as these and reinstalling, maybe
> even repartitioning? (I guess e-mail at least can be kept simply by moving it
> somewhere else first. But for much data I can't positively identify the actual
> files which contain the data.)
If you're running out of disk space, then there's not much chance you can
install a second copy of Windows. If you had a network or a writable CD-
ROM drive in your laptop, you could copy over to one of those, but you
have to keep in mind that it's not just a matter of a simple copy in
Windows Explorer, as the folders marked as hidden and/or system files
will not necessarily be copied (it all depends on your settings and the
method you use for the copy).
Your Internet Explorer history is stored in a folder called History
that's in your Windows directory, so you should be able to copy it and
restore it, but I'll admit, I've never tried that as I don't use IE as my
principle browser and don't have any clients who use it or who *do* use
it but don't care about losing the history.
Also, bookmarks in IE are stored as plain old shortcuts in the Favorites
folder, so it might be easiest to browser your history, save the things
you want as shortcuts, then backup the Favorites folder. Then you
wouldn't need to worry about restoring the History folder.
> >The easiest way to do that is to rename the existing Windows folder and then do
> >a fresh install into a new Windows folder.
>
> Not enough disk space to do that. Maybe I can make space, but I've got to
> figure that out and plan it properly first.
> Part of the problem might be that I probably made unwise partitions when I
> first got the computer due to not knowing what might be better, but which I
> thought at the time would suit what I planned to do. That means my C: drive is
> perhaps smaller than it should be.
Well, perhaps you should purchase Partition Magic so that you can
dynamically change that.
The swap file need not be on the C: drive, of course, so if you've got
space on other partitions, you can move it there.
Also, if it's Win95 OSR2, you should convert your drives to 32-bit FAT,
because that will gain a lot of space and remove the need for lots of
partitions to efficiently utilize the whole disk.
The PC I'm typing this on came with a 1GB hard drive, I re-partitioned
that with Partition Magic as soon as I purchased it into 4 partitions of
256MBs plus a small leftover partition. Later, I added a 20GB second hard
drive and partitioned it into 2 partitions, one of which took the place
of my D: drive (my programs drive), and the other of my F: drive (the
first active partition on each successive drive gets allocated a drive
letter first; in NT-based versions of Windows, you can control the drive
letters yourself), so I just moved all the data from the old D: partition
to the new D: drive, and all the data from the old F: partition to the
new F: drive, and then combined the old C: and D: partitions and the old
E: and F: partitions. I also upgrade to Win95 OSR2 at the same time so
that the new C: and E: drives could be 512MBs without having lots of
slack space (actually, the C: is 526MBs and the E:, 508MBs, but you get
the idea).
However, a laptop does not offer that capability.
> >Generally, this is better than wiping the hard drive because you'll have kept
> >all your old drivers, and also many programs will run fine without needing to
> >be reinstalled.
>
> That's an interesting idea, which I hadn't thought of. Thanks; I'll think
> about that. The C.D.-ROM which came with my laptop is one of those ones that
> reformats the C: drive when you reinstall (a system which I *hate*), but perhaps
> there are tricks for reinstalling in other ways - I don't really know.
It sounds to me like you need the machine to be gone over by an expert
who knows how to restore a screwed up Windows installation, or you need a
new laptop. Both are expensive propositions, but in the long run,
probably worth it in terms of productivity vs. the "hassle" factor.
--
David W. Fenton | http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates | http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
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