 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Only If You Want To Know Tom Coleman |
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I think one of the most frustrating aspects of computing is that there seems
to be so much that is just unknowable. I get dial help calls all the time from people who have this or that
problem. You know the kind of thing... Windows can't find RUN.DLL or "Your program has terminated
unexpectedly." or "Go to Jail. Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go and do not collect $200."
There are two significant aspects to these problems. The first is that the user has no idea of the cause,
and is trying to reconcile it with his or her particular view of computing. The other is that I have no idea
of the cause, and many times I have no idea of what the user is talking about. I do not often resort to
advising correct technique when wrist slashing but it has proved useful in the past.
Because I do not know the exact cause of the problem does not mean that I cannot fix it. Frequently these
problems come under a general heading of "Old Windows Installation". Once Windows had been installed for a
year or so it has had time to develop enough bad habits to be regarded as cranky. Adding and removing
programs and modifying the configuration often makes things worse, sooner. Eighteen months or two years down
the track and Windows suffered enough self-inflicted injuries to be regarded as no longer reliable.
For example, recently I tidied up a Windows installation that was loading just over 600 fonts at start up;
far too many fonts installed. Another used to reboot if you opened My Computer when Windows Explorer was
running. Many have developed a five-minute startup habit.
Defend Yourself
Windows does these things - it is the nature of the beast. If it was a car, no one would buy it. Either you
bail out of Windows or you defend yourself against the worst of its idiosyncrasies. The average computer user
cannot afford hand holding, so you need to practice a little self-defence. But, you do not need a black belt
in computing diagnostics to save yourself a lot of problems. What follows is a general waffle about some of
the techniques that will help keep you out of trouble and may solve some problems, even if you don't know
what the problem is.
Disk Full?
Once your hard disk is more than 90% full you can expect all sorts of file finding, file saving and
file using problems. These can occur when a program, any program is running, and you will have no hint of the
reason. Windows uses some of the available empty space in your hard disk to create a swap file and to
do various housekeeping tasks. Once the hard disk starts to get full, Windows runs out of space to do these
odd jobs and resorts to techniques that it's not very good at, and often stuffs up. Other programs can stuff
up too, because often they also need spare disk space for temporary file activities.
Uninstalling programs, emptying the recycle bin, doing a disk clean up will help, but these are all part of
the routine self discipline that you wished you would exercise. Dumping all of the .TMP, .BAK, .CHK, .$$$
files can also help. So too can running SCANDISK.
Generally SCANDISK goes ahead and does its thing and leaves you alone. Once in a while it will tell you it
had found some "lost clusters" or something else odd, and asks you if you want to save or delete it. All too
often users say to save it. So, this often useless and/or unrecoverable data is saved as files named
file0001.chk or file0002.chk, and so on. If you had said delete it, the space used would have been returned
as available disk space. If you have any files with a .CHK extension you would usually be no worse off by
deleting them.
What is going on here is to do with the dreaded File Allocation Table. The famous FAT of song and story.
There was a time when you had to sacrifice a chicken before you were allowed to look at the FAT. But even
that amount of computer voodoo was too much for Windows users so it is largely ignored these days. The FAT is
a file storage management system that keeps track of all of the sectors on your disk. Once in a while it gets
its sums wrong and some sectors become lost. They are no longer allocated to files, nor to blank space. They
have disappeared, fallen off the back, vanished. SCANDISK finds them and offers to save them as a file or as
blank space, as we have already discussed. It used to be that saving them as a file enabled you to hunt
through the file in case it contained important data that may otherwise be lost. These days no one knows how
to hunt through a file for missing data and in best part of thirty years of computing I have never found
anything useful in a .CHK file. Maybe I am just unlucky.
Many users lack the courage to delete files. This is a personal problem that can be overcome by throwing
money at it. Buying a larger hard disk does not overcome the lack of courage but it solves the problem in the
short term.
One Solution
Many Windows problems can be overcome by reinstalling Windows. This can be fraught with danger if you have
really major problems but it can be a painless way of overcoming quite a few otherwise unsolvable
mysteries.
Most users will install or reinstall Windows from the CD. This is at times a slow and sometimes problematic
way of doing it. If you have to install from scratch then you need to have a CD-ROM drive that works when the
computer starts. Your best bet is to use a startup floppy containing the necessary CD driver files. This
means Windows 98 or higher. With Windows 95 you needed to set up the CD driver in the CONFIG.SYS on the
floppy and have it installed by MSCDEX in the AUTOEXEC.BAT. All a bit beyond the average user but simple
enough in practice. All you need is a little curiosity.
There is a more functional way of installing Windows that is quicker and offers long term convenience. All
you need is some spare hard disk space. What follows applies to all versions of Windows from '95 on, only the
name of the folder/directory will be changed to suit the version you are using. I will discuss this exercise
using Windows 98 as an example.
Copy It All To the HDD
The Windows CD has a folder named \WIN98 that contains all of the installation files. You will need to create
a folder on one of your hard disks; any disk providing it has enough room on it to hold these files. Let's
call this folder \W98SETUP.
What follows may seem a bit confusing but if you try it as a practical exercise it is pretty simple. It's a
bit like trying to explain how to change gears in a manual car. Simple from behind the wheel but terrible in
the lounge room.
First create the W98SETUP folder on the hard disk. Next, open the WIN98 folder on the CD. Then (assuming you
are using Windows Explorer to do this) select Edit from the menu, and Select All. This will highlight all of
the files AND folders in the WIN98 folder on the CD. Now deselect all of the folders in the WIN98 folder. You
do this by holding down the Control key and left clicking the folders, one at a time. This will remove the
highlight. Now drag all of the (still selected) files at once, into the W98setup folder on your hard disk.
You finish up with a copy of all of the files, from the WIN98 folder on the CD, being copied to the W98SETUP
folder on the hard disk.
For Reinstallation
Now all you need do is change into the \W98SETUP folder and double click the Setup file. You should have
closed all other programs before running Setup. All you have to do is follow the prompts.
The Setup may detect that a Windows folder already exists and offer to install windows in a folder called
Windows.000. Change this and install to the original Windows folder. Later in the installation you will
almost certainly get a number of prompts about the file to be installed is older than the one already on the
hard disk. You should not install the older file. This will help retain your previous settings.
If it turns out that this reinstallation of Windows does not fix your problem then you will have to start
over again but this time install all of the older files to the hard disk. This will take out most of your
previous settings and cause much inconvenience setting things up again. It will, however, fix many
problems.
The short-term convenience of the above method of installing Windows is that it is much faster than doing a
complete installation from a CD. The long-term convenience is that Windows puts a note to itself in the
Registry telling itself where it was installed from. That is where it expects to find any files for
subsequent updates and modifications. You may never again be asked to install the CD in the drive when you
add hardware or modify the system. Windows will simply go to the W98SETUP folder, find the files and install
them. If ever it does ask for the CD you just point it at the W98SETUP folder.
If you have two hard drives and one is on the Primary IDE port and the other on the Secondary IDE port the
installation will go faster if you have the Windows folder on the Primary and \W98SETUP on the Secondary. You
see, you can read and write to separate IDE ports but you can only either read or write to the same IDE port.
This can be extended to any intensive read/write operation. Put the source and the target on separate IDE
ports (controllers) for faster performance.
Other Culprits
Sometimes your problems are caused by other programs or files that Windows loads and not by Windows itself.
For the most part these are loaded at startup and you see little or nothing of this happening. There are a
couple of ways that you can take a look at some parts of this process. Just because you can see what is going
on does not mean that you will make much sense of it. This is where a healthy curiosity comes in handy.
However, if you want to have a look around here are a few things you can do.
Go to Start|Run and type in SYSEDIT, then press {enter}. This gives you a look at a number of files that are
part of the system and the Windows startup procedure. If you enter MSCONFIG you get to look at a slightly
modified view of the same files plus a couple of others including the startup. They are the files that
Windows loads at startup. You can remove files from startup but only if you are sure they are no longer
required.
If you are just browsing around do not alter anything. If you are not sure whether you've altered anything
then do NOT save changes on the way out.
I don't propose to go into the ins and outs of these files here. Any one of them is worth two or three pages
of this magazine just to get started. Maybe some other time. The idea here is to point you in the right
direction - the rest is up to you. There is no magic bullet. You have to do the reading, ask the questions
and get involved. Many people would like to know more about computers, but only those who want to know will
succeed.
Reprinted from the April 2002 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
 
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