I’m having some major computer hassles at the moment and have decided I should reinstall Windows (95) onto my PC. My question is this: When I reinstall, do I lose the files I have already saved onto my hard drive (such as mp3s etc etc)? Pardon my technofear, but I’m not good at this sort of thing.
BTW, the problem with my PC is that I tried to install a whole load of fonts, and its now “overloaded” with the damn things, and will now only give me one single font to use. All my web pages appear in the same crappy font, too. Anyone with any ideas on how to fix this (Ive tried deleting the extra fonts) - I’ll be truly thankful for your help.
If you’re using IE, go to Tools, Options, then on the general tab there should be a font button in there that lets you select the font you want to use for IE. You can also go to Fonts in the control panel and get rid of any fonts you don’t need. If you just reinstall Windows you won’t lose anything on hard drive; however, I’m not sure if this would fix your problem since all your fonts and font settings will probably migrate from the old copy of windows already in your system. As a LAST resort, you could boot into DOS, uninstall Windows or delete the Windows folder and run Windows setup from DOS, but I wouldn’t recommend this unless the problem is intolerable, because you’ll lose your settings in Windows and have to reinstall all of your programs. Your mp3’s and anything not in your C:/Windows folder would remain intact. If you have anything on your desktop you want to save, be sure and move it as well.
If you have one of those computers like you get software already on it & you reinstall from the disk they gave you, yes, it clears you HD. If you have your own real full W95 cdrom, then no, it’ll just rewrite its own files that it needs.
You didn’t say anything about what type of computer you have so we just have to guess & then rewrite it all again after you tell us.
Reinstalling Win95?
There is only one way to properly reinstall Win95 – Format the system
Reloading Win95 ontop of itself never works – it causes more problems than it ever fixes.
Deleting and reinstalling windows is a flip of the coin – it may work, but depending on what files are corrupted.
Your best bet, if its about windows95 – back up your files and get ready to reload the system
‘Reloading Win95 ontop of itself never works -’
Always works for me. Plus, doing it your way you would have to have the full version of w95. Otherwise, you have to first put Dos on, then w3.1, then w95, takes forever.
W95 is intelligent enough that when you run the setup, it knows its already there on the HD & can put just what files it needs onto it.
W95 has a nifty system file checker, I don’t know if W95 does. Run:sfc
I would disagree. In a perfect world you might reformat the drive before reinstalling the OS, but in most situations people want to keep the data files they have. I have yet to meet many home users that back up at all, much less regularly.
If windows is really bothering you, get to the DOS prompt as Chief suggested, do a “deltree windows” which deletes the windows file tree and then reinstall. The only dwonside to this is that you do have to reinstall the programs you want to use as all links to them were just erased. The data files you were writing to should be fine.
I am just saying that from personal experience reloading win95 on top of it self that it never works. Out of the number of times I’ve tried it, more issues were caused than were solved. Deltree windows is a better way, yes, but if your going to do that then you have to recreate all references to your software, might as well reinstall it then. If those files you have are that imporntant why are they not backed up somewhere else beside the HDD?
Windows 95 and Windows NT have limits to the amount of fonts you can load.
I don’t recall the exact number but your best bet is to limit fonts. On my Win95 machine I have 252 fonts installed I think the limit is 350. I have not pushed Win98 and I care not to because Win98 is just a fat OS that mimics Win95 with more problems.
When I did a graphics project on the old machine, I would install a font I wanted to use then unistall and/or uninstall another font.
If you find that unistalling fonts (reboot before surfing the web or whatever) does not help you with your situation then reinstalling Win95 should be a viable solution without loosing data.
you can change fonts under tools/internet options/general/fonts in IE. otherwise, use ATM, if you have a lot of fonts and want to regulate which ones are open, you can download ATM from Adobe’s site. This lets you set up suitcases as well.
As for reinstalling, smartest thing i would think from experience is this: back up any documents you’ve created that you want to keep, word documents, data/spread sheets…etc. any pics, ie. your collection of porn, what have you… then before you reinstall Win95, copy the entire contents of the WIN95 section on the CD to a directory on your hard drive, or do this afterwards, it really doesn’t matter, re-install 95, you can do this on top of old 95, but unless you have the full cd, its not possible, and if you do have it, but have no experience formatting and partitioning your drive, you may not want to do that either. you can though, it’s the best way to install correctly.
anyway, go ahead with your install, make sure you have that directory aside somewhere of WIN95 from the CD, specifically so that later, when the computer asks you to insert your cd when you are installing stuff, you won’t have to, you can just redirect it to the directory.
Yes, W95 has some crap in it that makes the font folder crap when it reaches a certain amount of fonts. But you can easily change that with the patch I think that its still at microsoft.com
Tweakui might have a correction for it too.
Also Dave, before youc an use fonts, you have to register them. Did you open the font folder in the control panel & look?