[Ham-Computers] Question abt Win 98

[jandlmiller at bellsouth.net]

Hylton's response to Brian's inquiry was interesting and full of experience.  Hylton seemed to be recommending a shut down of all the stuff that ScanDisk was never allowed by it's code to tolerate, to include but not be limited to screen savers, monitor shut-down settings, virus scans, firewalls and others in today's arena of confusion.

Hylton, Brian and you others please add your two-cents worth to this:  why not (in W98SE) do Start/Run/msconfig, and on the General tab select Load startup group items with a click in the box that now is likely gray.  Your click should deselect all the startup items and cause the box to become white without the check mark.  Then select Apply, followed by OK.  At this point you will see a confirmation screen and a Yes will commence the obligatory restart your computer to clear out the startup group items (but not delete them from your hard drive).  When the restart has finished, and you retrace these steps, briefly read the General tab information AND ALSO select the Startup tab.  You should see that all, or nearly all of the boxes are blank and you will see the clock and perhaps another icon in the systray.  All other startup items have been diabled (but not deleted) by the action taken in msconfig.

Then run ScanDisk followed by Disk Defragmenter, in that order.

My question is this: with all the startup items disabled as above, does ScanDisk have less chance of being interrupted a number of times as it does it's thing in the Thorough mode with Automatically fix errors checked?

For any of you who have a Win95B machine around, or remember it, there was no easy way to do what is outlined above for Win98SE because there was no msconfig.  In Win95B when you typed Ctrl-Alt-Del you saw a Close Program window.  You had to do an End Task on all except Explorer and Systray to get rid of the others.  Even then, you were not really sure those start up items were actually disabled because all you were told was that they were no longer in the Close Program window.  If you had good luck you got through this time-consuming procedure without a problem; in the alternative you got the blue-screen-of-death and got to start over again from the beginning so that more of your time was lost.  Productivity?

Along the line, many theorized that the instability of Win95B, and to a lesser degree Win98SE, was caused by these OS being built on the MS/DOS platform.

Do any of you have and other-than-theory information that this was accurate?

73 de John W0IKT