I have no clue what is wrong with the confounded thing.
I’m very sick of having the illegal error message pop up every 2 to three minutes and taking my computer activities with it down the drain! I hate you, technology! So… I was going to take it to a computer techie type place and get it cleaned up (it won’t even defrag!) and was told to update to Windows XP (?) because no one will be working on Windows 98 anymore. OK… from my insignificant knowledge of computers and whatnot, it seems reasonable.
I am hoping I don’t have a virus or some crap and I’m still not sure whether I do or not, or if I should go with this XP thing or not, or blow away the whole computer with my 1920’s style Death Ray!!! My computer is mocking me (right now, it’s behaving… I’m suspicious :dubious:) and I’m in the process… the slow, slow process of putting my writing and mental droolings onto disk before the clean-up/update event. With that stupid error message popping up so frequently, it’s a very annoying process to boot. Someone help me, someone give of their techie/computer knowledge and explain why my computer is crappin’ out and what XP is all about… please? Pretty please with sugar on top? Pretty please with sugar on top and chocolate covered strawberries? Pretty pl---- JUST HELP ME OUT, man!!
For all that is HOLY and GOOD, help me! 
(poor lil’ spider is stressed out)
If you have your Win98 SE CD just reformat and reinstall everything or do a overwrite install. If you do have the CD and don’t won’t to tackle this job, take the CD and all the drivers for your hardware to the techie and have him do it.
They get paid by the hour so they will do it.
btw, I still use 98SE and won’t change (upgrade??) until I have to.
I’m not particularly computer literate, but I was having similar problems to you a year or so ago. After much stuffing about, it turned out I needed a new hard drive (well, so the 'puter techie said!). Anyway, he installed a new hard drive and all has been well ever since.
BTW, I have Windows XP and have been using it for the past 2 or 3 years and have absolutely no complaints with it. Apparently, it’s not much different to Windows 98 anyway.
Good luck, Sanguine, I hope you get it sorted out.
(P.S. Great idea to back up all your files onto CD - I lost so much precious stuff when my hard drive shat itself!)
Hey, I run Win98SE to this day (I refuse to bow to Bill Gates and upgrade) and I’m a computer techie. Can you post the exact wording of the error message? I’ve become quite the expert at resolving Win98 problems without having to reformat/reinstall (short of HD failure). Heck, ship your computer to me and I’ll bet I can fix it in no time (Hellizona sounds a bit far for a house call).
I’m a Support Tech for a large government agency and support everything from Windows 95 (still!!) to Windows 2000 and very shortly, XP. At home, I run W98 SE and my wife runs Win ME. When a machine gets as balky as yours seems to be, a reload should solve it. I’ll be doing my own and my wifes’, soon.
There are a couple of things to comment on. First of all, our hard drives are no more that an elaborate system of organizing rust. That is, particles of iron oxide are oriented to their north or south poles to create zeros and ones. Scary as it is, that is the system our civilization runs on, and it is a miracle that it works as well as it does. Windows 98SE is based on a DOS/Windows 95 kernal and has some real problems, like memory leakage and a tendancy to corrupt files. In our environments, we rarely have Windows 95 machines go more than two years without having to reimage (reload) the software. Unix based (especially) and Windows NT based operating systems seem to do a better job of detecting and fixing the inevitable errors that the hardware makes. Windows XP is based on Windows NT technology which is industrial strength and much more stable. Personally, I still like Windows 2000 better, primarily because I have a lot more experience with it, but W2K is nearing the end of its supported product life. W98 SE is totallly unsupported by Microsoft, now, as is DOS, W95 and WinNT. They aren’t providing It hapatches and critical updates for those OSes when the bad guys find and write exploits for the numerous security holes that still seem to exist. UNIX based OSes such as Macintosh OS X and Linux have their enthusiastic supporters, but we’re talking Windows/Intel/AMD here and those aren’t viable alternatives for most of us.
I think you will be much happier if you back up all your data files onto CD and reload with XP. Be aware that you will have to reinstall all your other software, too, and there could be some bumps with getting that all sorted out. I just did a volunteer project for a non-profit where I upgraded an office of W95, W98 SE, and Win ME machines to Windows 2000 Pro. They had some old legacy software that was missing install disks and documentation, and we had some adventures around that stuff, but even with the problems, they are much happier. The Chief Financial officer, who had a W98 machine was having two to five lockups per day and hasn’t been down once since the upgrades. It had to be the OS, since the hardware hasn’t changed.
I’d say back up your stuff and bite the bullet.
Good Luck!
welp, i can’t give you any help, but i must say I’m glad I’m not the only one this is happening to! Everytime I bloody open my favorites, i get that damn error message. Sometimes I go to type an address in up top and i get the damn error message. I HATE MY COMPUTER…and yet…I love it…
Hope you get the problem fixed, SanguineSpider. My advice - don’t upgrade to XP it stinks big time. I’m still using NT; it has a nice repair install feature and overall it’s been pretty good to me but it costs a lot of $$$. My experience with Windows 98 has been less than satisfactory though.
Good luck!
We’ve had a similar problem with our computer. (I’m on the downstairs computer right now, not ours.) Our message was “Cannot write to drive C” in essence. We think our hard drive has just gone out. Either that, or it was messed up by a defrag that somehow went awry. (Though we don’t know how, it defragged overnight.) We hope that we can boot the computer one last time, and write all the information to the new drive which we are going to purchase, and go from there. All this with the help of a hero, our computer tech friend. THANK YOU Jon!!!
Has anyone heard about a virus that will do this? Our computer WOULD NOT write cookies, or any kind of information to the hard drive. It froze up, and gave a black screen which I read to our tech friend over the phone. He said not to even boot it again until we try to fix it.
I hope you get it straightened out soon SanguineSpider. Good Luck.
Hi, SanguineSpider, how’s it going? Thought I’d way in with my own humble opinion.
My home desktop and my work computer both run XP and run just fine. XP definitely has advantages over 98. However, having said that, I do NOT recommend trying to upgrade. The reason is your computer hardware. From a practical point of view if you want to run XP you will almost certainly need to add more memory. XP is far more memory intensive than 98. And if your computer is as old as I think it is, finding memory won’t be easy and (perversely enough) it won’t be as cheap as newer memory.
But your potential for disaster comes in loading XP itself. Loading a new OS on an aging and potentially error-prone hard-drive is just asking for trouble. See, loading any OS and particularly loading XP is a extremely disk-intensive activity, and if your hard drive is on the edge, this could send it to its grave. Ouch!
My advice would be: (1) Back up your important data now, just in case. If you don’t have a CD writer or Zip drive, grab a portable CD-writer or zip from someone. Trust me, you do NOT want to use floppies! The pain just isn’t worth it. (2) Buy a new hard-drive – the cheapest you can find, which should be well under $100. It’ll still be better’n what you’ve got. (3) Install the new drive as the primary, and switch the old drive to be secondary. Re-install 98 to the new drive. Then copy whatever is important directly from the old drive. Once you’re done copying, remove the old drive and, like, use it as a coaster or something.
If you can afford it, even better would be to buy a new computer altogether. If you keep your old monitor, etc., from the old computer, you can buy a new box for under $500 which will be better than what you currently have. This has been my theory of upgrading for some time now and works like a charm (although I build mine from scratch, but the theory’s the same).
Well, that is MHO, for what it’s worth. Good luck. 
And, of course, that should read “weigh in with my humble opinion …” Stupid fingers!
Spider, until recently, I was like you: running Win98, refusing to cave to the pressure to move to ME, Win2 or XP. Then, I got a wireless network for my birthday (had to - was tired of the wire running up the stairs from the cable modem in the basement, and I wanted to get my PocketPC wireless) and found the network wouldn’t run on Win98. Grrr, I thought.
Then, I installed XP. It isn’t that different from 98 visually, but performance-wise I have noticed some enhancements and improvements that almost - almost - have me convinced not to switch to a Mac with our next computer.
What many post-ers above are suggesting is what is commonly known as a brain-wipe. Sometimes, in the world of computers, ya need to wipe it all off the hard-drive to get rid of the stray bits of garbage that are clogging your system and it back to the clean, pristine state it prefers. Think of it as being akin to the bi-annual cleaning you do of your house to get rid of that stuff that’s been taking up precious storage space in your drawers and closets…and suddenly you find out your home is nicer than you thought!
I agree with Ponder Stibbons… your computer’s GUTZ are probably too old to handle an upgrade.
I don’t want to waste space by reiterating other’s advice, so i’ll go straight to the new business.
If you find your hard drive fails miserably and can’t copy your data off of it, there is one last hope. Take out the drive, freeze it for 30 min and then reinstall it. Copy copy copy… cuz when it warms up, it’s a paperweight.
We would like an update, SanguineSpider, so that we can further diagnose and remedy.
Thank you ALL for the advice and personal tales of woe and wonderment! I will keep you all updated, of course I will. I have this to add:
I went into the help menu and tried some stuff. OK… well, I’m not getting the error message anymore AND I can shut off my computer without any problem now BUT my computer is STUCK in safe mode. The graphics suck goat butt and I can’t get out of safe mode!!! I’ve tired a few things but to no avail. Safe mode makes my eyes hurt when I read print (even now, my eyes are squinting to make out what I’m typing but because I love the SDMB SOOOOOOOO much, I’ll keep squinting. I must keep reading because I love reading your posts… yes, YOUR posts!)
If someone could tell me how to exit the safe mode, I’d… I’d… I’D bake you a pie!! Sex is out of the question because I’ve got a wonderful SO, sorry…
I’m nowhere near as learned in computer stuff as Ponder Stibbons, but I’ll second the vote to add a new hard drive. That’s what I did when my five year old computer started to hint that it was getting tired. Not being handy with computer guts, I took my tower in to my local computer guru and had him install the new hard drive and copy all my files over to it. Now I’ve gone from 2 gigs of free memory to 30+ gigs, and the beast runs faster and with fewer apparent errors. I’m still running Windows 98, though no doubt eventually I’ll have to switch to XP.
A couple of things to keep in mind if you go this route:
-
If you have any emails you want to save, export them to a floppy or CD, or into your My Documents folder. Store copies of your address book and browser favorites in both places, too. My email and browser programs reloaded just fine, but as blank slates.
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Any peripherals running via USB ports may be a problem. My workhorse B&W draft printer runs off the printer port, but my color printer, scanner, and camera jack all run off a USB hub. When I got my tower back, the main printer was fine, but none of the others would work. I drove myself nuts trying to get the system to recognize the peripherals, even uninstalled and reinstalled the software – no dice. Even my mouse wouldn’t work at first, until a return trip to the shop (where it had worked fine) got it recognized and operative.
Finnaly I had to call my guru in for a home visit. After trying all the stuff I had, to no avail, he had to go to the website of each peripheral’s manufacturer and download a patch to get them working. He explained that this often happens with USB connections in this sort of situation.
Good luck!
SS, when you boot up does it actually SAY you’re in safe mode, or does the screen just look really awful.
It sounds like your display drivers got whacked (or possibly the screen settings got reset).
Go into Display Properties first and check the Settings tab. Look at the Colors option and make sure they’re not set to 16 and the Screen Area is not set at 640x480. If they are like that, try to change them. If you chan’t change them or the settings don’t take, your display drivers need to be updated.
First find out what kind of graphics card you have. While in Display properties Settings tab, click the Advanced button at the bottom and then the Adapter tab when the new dialog box comes up. Your graphics card make/model will be listed at the top. Post that here in your thread and we can probably point you to the correct place on the web to download a fresh set of drivers. Or, if you still have your drivers disk for the card, simply rerun the setup and see if it fixes it.
If everything fails SS, drop me a message so I can take a look! I am your official SDMB local cheap tech in the east of Phoenix!!!
Here is the error message I was getting:
Explorer:
This program has performed an illegal function and will be shut down. If the problem persists, contact the program vendor.
What means this computer message, eh? You tell me or I burning your dog!!
And then sometimes a blue screen pops up and says to hit any key to continue but when I try to, it sometimes goes black… black like DEATH!! shudder
Horseflesh, I will try checking my display later tonight when my daughter is asleep. And it doesn’t say safe mode, only looks like crap (I am assuming it’s in safe mode due to the “horrid and hurtful to my eye” graphics). I never did anything to get out of safe mode… I think.
ETF, I’ve added some extra memory before, about a year or so ago. As I did then, I shall have the techie-manboy help with every aspect of installation because if I do not, I will go quietly and assuredly bonkers. I’m odd enough without being bonkers to boot.
I hate technology when it’s being petty and perverse. I love it when it works as it should. Like almost everything else in my life, it’s the love/hate thing… sigh
You techie-manboys and girls… I envy your power. Technology makes the baby Jesus cry!
SanguineSpider: is that Explorer: the internet browser, or the File Explorer?
Let me know if I can help you, remember that I live close to you.
I prefer the term Computer Cowboy. (It IS kind of like the Old West and bronco busting; no rules, hold on for a wild ride, and use any solution you can to lick the problem.)
Eh, that error message is vague enough to mean practically anything. Could be a corrupt swap file, wonky memory, etc. I’ll wager you get this message when browsing the Internet, right? Do you have the latest version of IE installed? If not, try Windows Update or go here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/ie6sp1/finrel/6_sp1/W98NT42KMeXP/EN-US/ie6setup.exe .
But fix your “Safe Mode” problem first. Which, btw, it doesn’t sound like you are in safe mode, just got a graphics driver problem.
I’d let GIGObuster take a crack at it if you’re uncomfortable with any of that.
For what it’s worth, my computer (running '98) managed to look like it was in safe mode without actually being in safe mode… turned out to be a virus. Once that was removed, it was all back to normal.
~ Isaac