RE: [OT] Bloody Computers :-(

["Mark Hetherington (egroups)" <mark.egroups@xxxxxxx>]

> Got to the DOS prompt and ran Scandisk. 29% gave up :-(
> Got to the DOS prompt again and DIR C:\ /s
> Part way through listing the Windows Directory it dies :-(
> New Hard Disk required. :-(

Did you try a low level ScanDisk or just the normal one? The low level
should "fix up" the drive at least temporarily. It might just
have some
dodgy blocks rather than be completely fuxored. It may even recover enough
from the Windows directory for the machine to boot up, or maybe an install
over might be needed to fix it up. Useful if you need to get the machine
going until you can replace the hard drive rather than having to get one
immediately but will take up a bit of time.

> Problem 2
> Now when I boot the machine up it hangs. It will come up in safe
> mode OK. If
> will come up in normal mode if I escape the Network Logon.

When I installed MacFee AV on my Win98SE PC, I was also unable to boot and
the PC hung at the same place. Had to disable it all from Safe mode to get
the PC rebooted then eventually uninstalled it since I couldn't use it. A
friend of mine who was installing the same package at the same time had the
same problem. We both ran the same firewall software (AtGuard at the time
but she also used Zone Alarm) so possibly a conflict between the AV program
and firewall software in general.

WRT the rest of your post, you could try a clean install of Win98SE and
then
try the applications before applying updates. It could be a problem between
the software and OS updates. Moving to Win2K Pro would really depend on if
you want the expense or potential hassle of being unable to run some
programs. Although Win2K is very good and much more usable than NT for
general purpose machines, there is some software which doesn't run on it.
So
as long as all your software is reasonable new and you have no great
reliance on any DOS based software and you don't mind the cost, then I
would
recommend Win2K Pro. If you already happen to have Win2K then a dual boot
system might be useful to give you the best of both worlds (I recommend
using seperate partitions rather than sharing one in this case so that
Win2K
can use NTFS).

HTH,

Mark