Well, first of all, my antiquated 4 year old 166Mhz Pentium-MMX decided it would no longer load any major applications. Reluctantly, decided that solution was to reload Windoze 95. Which is when I found that the distribution CD-ROM no longer matched the Authentication Number from Microsoft ... (Doh! #1)
Acquired new system based on ASUS CUSI-M SiS Socket 370 MicroATX Motherboard, with 700Mhz Celeron processor, 2 X 10Gb IDE drives (on which more in a moment), 128Mb Ram,and additional Parallel and Serial ports (interestingly, it assigns the additional serial ports as Com5 and Com6 - and they don't seem to work, but that's the least of my problems). Windoze 98 second edition pre-installed.
Spent a happy (not!) Saturday afternoon re-loading all my apps, and then the system decided that it will only boot in "Safe" mode. Not very useful, and I couldn't get the mother to do anything to get out of it. Back to the supplier who reformatted the C: drive and re-installed the OS (so that I lost all the apps I had installed). Another happy afternoon re-installing, and soon after it did the same thing - "Safe" mode, preceeded by a message saying there had been a stack overflow, and advising that I set a higher value for "Buffers=" in my config.sys file (Doh!#2). Have never ever before been asked to tinker with DOS settings on a Windoze machine ...
This time I finally managed to get it to come back up, but in VGA mode (640 X 400) and only a 16 colour palette. Managed to sort this out - with difficulty - by setting resolution (re-boot) then set colour to hicolour (re-boot).
The reasoning behind the second 10Gb drive is so that I can use Norton Ghost to back up the system and restore it if necessary. Good thinking as it turns out, because recovery is more or less a daily occurence. Which is however a king-size time waster ... Today it claimed to have lost a a modem control panel extension file (Modem.CPL) which I could however see with Windows Explorer.So I couldn't log onto the net. Bah!
Now -- Anyone got any comments on the ASUS board referenced above? Does this have any known inherent problems (eg. with the on-board video card) that could lead to these sort of problems? I have picked up a vague rumour that it experiences interrupt conflicts and can crash pretty often ...
Secondly, can anyone suggest some reliable diagnostic software that I can use to try and work out what's going on?
In Hope (and desperation!)
