Do you know anyone that has installed DSL?
No. In my neighborhood the Phone Morons can't deliver DSL and the Cable Morons can't deliver cable internet access. Government-sanctioned monopolies have no reason to be responsive. Thank you, US Worst and Cocks Communication.
Should I uninstall and reinstall Windows 98? I am not a Techie and things seem to be getting worse with me in that department.
I should preface this with the statement that I am a techie and I've been playing with PC's since my first 8088 with a flip-top case back in 1985 or 1986.
Assuming that you have a Windows installation disk, you should probably re-install Win98. Don't uninstall it first, though. If things are really bad and don't get better with a re-install, then you may want to do a fresh install. The problem with doing a fresh install is that often you don't have installation disks for pre-installed software and you'd lose those applications.
IF you want to do a fresh install, here's what I recommend (and I've done this myself, most recently when I upgraded to WinMe). This method allows very easy recovery from a botched installation at the cost of a little extra effort.
First make a Windows Boot/Rescue Disk so that you can boot without a good HD partition and still get to your CD, which you'll need to install Win98. Test this before doing anything else because some CDs are really funky and need obscure drivers.
Do a ScanDisk to make sure there are no errors.
Clean up any temporary/cache files.
Get Partition Magic (if you're upgrading to WinMe there's an issue with Partition Magic, but I'll assume you're staying with Win98), install it, and make a Boot/Rescue floppy.
Defragment.
(I'm assuming you have only one disk partition for the following instructions.)
Using Partition Magic, shrink your current boot partition (logical drive C) as small as you can. Hopefully you can get it down to a quarter or less the size of your physical disk. Create a Logical Partition area (I forget the exact terminology) at least big enough to hold the shruken boot partition but make sure you leave plenty of space in the Primary Partition area (where the boot partition resides). Copy the old boot partition into the logical partition area and mark it hidden. Using the empty space in the Primary Partition area create a new boot partition. Mark it as active (which will cause the old boot partition to become inactive and hidden).
You now have a disk that appears to be empty to DOS and Windows. If you boot to a floppy and install Windows you will be doing a clean install. If the installation goes awry, you can boot from the Partition Magic boot/rescue disk, mark the original old boot partition active, reboot, and you're back in business.
Once the installation is complete, you'll need to re-install all of your applications. Then, using Partition Magic, unhide the copy (not the original) of the old boot partition. Now you can copy all of your old program's datafiles from your old installation.
Once you're done with all of this, you'll want to delete the two old boot partitions and expand your boot partition back to full size.
Good luck. |
