OK, so we went out and bought a Compaq Presario just about a year ago now. We’ve tried to be pretty assiduous about keeping the amount of software and programs down to a minimum, although I recently installed Adobe PageMaker, Photoshop, and a flatbed scanner with driver.
Now the damn thing likes to freeze up for no apparent reason, occasionally giving us the Blue Screen of Death when we hit Crtl-Alt-Del, occasionally restarting, and occasionally going black and doing nothing.
Once in a while, however, it gives us the message that an internal stack overflow has caused all this heartburn, and we should reconfigure our STACKS in the CONFIG.SYS file.
So:
-
How the heck do we reconfigure the STACKS?
-
Will doing that eliminate most of the computer hangfires we’re getting?
First of all, the solution might not necessarily be to change your config.sys file. Stack overflow is often caused by bad programming (basically, a part of the code references an incorrect part of your computer’s memory, the stack overloads, and the program crashes)…so it might be one of the applications your running.
However, if you do need to change the STACKS:
It might depend on what operating system you’re running on.
(I’m currently using Windows NT…my config.sys file is empty).
Anyway, to change the STACKS, first go to the MS-DOS Command Prompt. (Its under START–>PRORAMS–>Command Prompt if you’re in windows). Go to the root directory (C:) and type either ‘edlin config.sys’ or ‘edit config.sys’ (probably ‘edit config.sys’, unless you’re running a really old copy of windows)…just look for the line that says STACKS=somenumber, and you can just go and edit the number manually.
IIRC, you want to make the number of STACKS higher than what it is currently listed as (this is what I remember doing from MS-DOS 5.0 anyway).
Starbury, what’s “edlin”? I know for a fact that “edit” dates back to the pre-Windows days; did some early versions of Windows still carry a second- (or higher) generation legacy editor?
Edlin’s a programming language that used to come with DOS. Most people used (use?) it to write batch files. From what I can recall, there wasn’t an editor in the DOS versions before 5.0 (but I could be wrong), so I always used edlin to change my autoexec.bat and config.sys files. When you type ‘edlin filename.ext’ it will list out the file line by line, with line numbers listed. You can then do ‘e#’, and edit that specific line.
I’m sure Olent has ‘edit’ on his computer, but I just wanted to make sure all the bases were covered.
Also, to quote myself:
Often found in Windows itself.