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Tuesday, 06/25/2002 Entry: "We Interrupt the current Flow of Life (or lack thereof) With a Windows Upgrade"
We Interrupt the current Flow of Life (or lack thereof) With a Windows Upgrade
I like to consider myself fairly computer savvy. "Fairly computer savvy" means that I know my way around a computer enough to make most users envious, but not well enough to get hired for a high-paying job. I pride myself for this cusp, because hardcore geeks lack the rapport and ability to enlighten people with what they know, while I have the ability to guide the most clueless and intimidated users into self-reliance.Naturally, as with anyone who has even an iota of savvy, I possess a disdain for Bill Gates and Microsoft. There are many reason which I won't go into. Suffice it to say, I paid my dues with Betamax, and decided to join the 32-bit revolution - kicking and screaming - in 1997 with Windows 95b. Other than a couple of stupid mistakes on my part, I've never had any major trouble with Win95. It's never lost data, nothing was ever serious enough to warrant formatting... It's just that over the past couple of years, Microsoft has stopped making upgrades to it. So it's really a question of whether I want to be further oppressed by The System (and I'll leave my rant over Roadrunner's discriminatory tech support policy for another day), or upgrade - kicking and screaming - to Windows 98 Second Edition.
I won't go into J&R's sucky mailorder service. I finally got my upgrade disk and gathered as much info off the web as I could on the transition (No one I knew had actually done it themselves. They either did the dreaded format and installed cold, or bought a new PC. Packrat that I am, formatting the C Drive is beyond my realm of comprehension, must less consideration). I did everything: - uninstalled MSPlus! except for Pinball and Themes
- Disabled all bootup and automatic features in Norton
- Removed all applications from automatically starting up
- Emptied Temporary Internet Files and the c:\Windows\Temp directory
(oh wow she didn't say "folder"!) - Disabled my screensaver
- Set my background file to none
- Defragged
- Scandisk with surface check
- Made sure only systray and explorer showed in Task Manager
I was ready to go. The install went smoothly. Or appeared to. It was annoying that it wouldn't restart, but instead hang on the wait screen (geeks: when it shows the logow.sys file). So of course when I restarted I had to turn the CPU off and on. But what was annoying was the fact that after installation was complete, it would hang on the startup screen (Geeks: the logo.sys file in root directory). I could boot into safe mode, but it would take about 5 minutes of the hourglass over black background before "ugly mode" would appear. After some Annoyances book maneuvers without success, I went into ugly mode again to uninstall Windows 98. I'm just grateful [i]that[/i] feature works. Each time I did it (I had attempted three times to upgrade over the past week), it would restore my PC to its original state. And lemme tell you, there's nothing more welcome than the sight of Zorak's hypnotic eyes and the promise of a return normalcy. Well thank gawd for long distance prefix codes. Last night I spent FOUR HOURS with a Microsoft rep. I uninstalled Norton (which was kicking and screaming to the point where I had to scour the registry for remaining unwelcome elements) and upgraded with the rep on the phone. He thought I knew more computers than he did. I don't know about that. I mean granted his focus is the Win98 upgrade exclusively, and he probably has a set of pages of things to do. And I'll be we did them all, with hanging and 5-minute bootups in between attempts after the upgrade was made for fourth time. After a lot of msconfig tampering and other fun foibles, we tried the last resort: disabled all devices in My Computer Device Manager except for the keyboard, the mouse, and the system. WOW!!! A normal bootup! Well, sort of normal. I persuaded him to let me reactivate the floppy drive, which would serve as my sole liaison between my home PC and the Internettable work PC. He said it wasn't a good idea and to wait until I spoke with the supertechnogeeks for phase 2 of my tech support adventure (it was 11:30pm and I was losing mental cohesion). He felt that the floppy could be one of the devices responsible for my problems. I told him the day they made upgrades to a floppy drive... So for the moment it functions. Sort of. With the A-Drive. A supertechnogeek from Microsoft is supposed to call me tonight or tomorrow night and go over the devices check with me, enabling one thing at a time until disaster strikes and we pinpoint the thing or things which need new drivers. Till then, no Internet access at home, and low-maintenance usage. I guess I'll bring my novel transcript home and work more on it. Besides, it's Croc Week on Animal Planet. Lots of TV and watching Steve get attacked by ornery animals.
TBC
  
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