So … I was having a ton of problems with Windows 98 … too slow, a memory hog, and continual crashes … so I sez to myself, “Self? Go back to Windows 95.”
Bad idea. Apparently this is not something that Microsoft wants you to do. Pain in the butt. had to trick the machine into thinking it didn’t have 98 anymore somehow, then reload all my drivers, etc …
Almost everything works now, except for some reason I haven’t been able to convince the machine that I have a CD ROM drive. It playes regular music CDs fine, and the “D” drive shows up on the explorer menu, but for some reason, everythime I try to access it, eithere it freezes up, or sez “Drive not ready.” Which is crazy, because I loaded Win 95 from the CD drive.
Euty, I wanted to do the same thing and realized the near impossibility of it, or at least that I wasn’t willing to put forth all that effort. I just ordered Linux for Dummies last week. I’ll let you know how my progress goes…
If win95 was running OK, then win98 should also run OK. Did you upgrade or do a clean install? My suggestion is to do a clean install and reinstall all your software. I do this at least once a year just to clean out the system. After the months go by it does seem to become more unstable. But sometimes it is much faster than others… who knows.
My recommendation is to try to do a clean install of WIN98. The more you upgrade/downgrade/install/remove etc., the more messed up the Registry becomes. But WIN98 really should run correctly on your computer.
Euty, I believe if you look under control panel–>system—>far right tab, you’ll see your computer is in “DOS compatibility mode”. And that is what causes this PITA. It means you have drivers for the controllers that are acting wiggy. Normally, it’s a previous OS, or a Boot sector virus(obviously it’s the OS thing).
I prefer to re-format and do a fresh install of my OS when I ewncounter troubel like this, but you might find advice from the board helpful.
Windows doesn’t take kindly to being downgraded, especially with Windows 98’s heavy web-integration. If I was in your situation, I’d back up everything, reformat, then re-install 95 and all your software.
If you feel somewhat brave, and your peripherals support it, would you consider moving to an NT-based Windows? NT Workstation 4 is less of a memory hog than 98 (it runs fine with 32MB), is rock solid for general desktop use, and seems to run faster than 95 on a PII/233 with 96 MB of RAM.