Viewing Thread:
"Oh dear god, my PC's gone mad"

ok,

I turned on my PC a little while ago, and scandisk came up for whatever reason, then I was given a message about windows finding an error and needing to revert back to a previous system file, and needed to be restarted. As this was the only option, I just said ok and let it go about its business.

Now, when Windows 98 loads up, the entire desktop has changed its settins. In Web Pages, programs and the desktop icons, the text has enlarged itself a little, whereas the start and taskbar remain the same size as before. I went to change the screen settings on this, thinking it was only a minor thing. Now, the desctop icons, web pages and program text appear in the sizes they used to as normal, but now the start button, taskbar and all programs (Word, IE etc) appear with smaller title bars and buttons.

Also, programs that used to run fine, like MSN, Flash/Shockwave and Java Applets within web pages no longer work. Not only that, but programs I had set up not to load up when Windows does now do load up.

I've tried running the CD Burner software to back-up my files, but that is one of the programs that also no longer works, and I'm a little worried about doing anything without backing-up particular files.

What the hell has happened to my computer???

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Advice cjh
Dont open them, i was messing about and the came open and to this day i still find little balls around my pc.

cjh wrote:
> I've just had the drive delivered, and found included with it is a
> little bag of tiny clear and pink balls.
>
> It says on the packaging that they are 'Silica Gel'.
>
> What are these used for???

They absorb any moisture in the box while the drive is being stored / shipped - they reduce condensation. Most electronic products have them in the packaging, but you can throw them away now.

I've just had the drive delivered, and found included with it is a little bag of tiny clear and pink balls.

It says on the packaging that they are 'Silica Gel'.

What are these used for???

All Hard Drives report a sligntly lower Space than the advertised size. I'm not sure as to why, but I know a Hard Drives size will always be lower than advertised. It's a standard practice in the Hard Drive business.

I've got a Western Digital 80GB coming tomorrow though :)

On more think though, before I go putting it in. Like I said, I have Win2000 to go on the New Drive, but when I previously tried to load Win2000, I was told I could not from the DOS prompt.

How am I supposed to install Win200 freshly on the drive if I can't do it through an older Windows Start-up floppy??? As I would prefer not to install win98 and put win2000 over the top.

Thanks all :)

GasMask wrote:
> Oh, quick not on hdd's. a 40gb hdd, you'd think oh sweet, 40gb of
> space.
>
> Wrong, it'll come up at around 33gb.

Hmm. My 40gb hard drive comes up with a capacity of 38.1gb, not too much of a problem really.

Would this amount depend on the manufactuer?

Hrm, that actually sounds more like some kind of hardware limitation, rather than the ol' binary to decimal round-off. Old motherboards may only have support for hard disks up to 32GB in size - you could have one of these motherboards, which is refusing to read past the 32nd gig. This is unlikely though, the only time I've ever plugged a hard disk into a board that didn't support it, they just refused to talk, period. To get around this, some more modern hard disks have a jumper setting which restricts them to only the first 32GB of the disk - you may well have this set accidentally.

It's because 1KB is 1024B, 1MB is 1024KB and 1GB is 1024MB. However, HDD manufacturers like to replace those numbers with 1000, because they can, and it means you get smaller drives than they're supposed to be.

That, and the filesystem itself uses space.

Oh, quick not on hdd's. a 40gb hdd, you'd think oh sweet, 40gb of space.

Wrong, it'll come up at around 33gb.

System usage or something.

Annoyed me quite a bit :op

Maxtor for meee its nice and quiet.

which hard drive did you get and how much was it.

I recently got a 60gb western digital hard drive.

You have to format the hard drive first.

What i did was put my second hard drive as slave running with my old hard drive, then i formarted it ( new hard drive) then switched them round.