|
|
| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 269 responses total. |
keesan
|
|
response 225 of 269:
| 
May 30 13:24 UTC 2002 |
After the ATT did not recognize the hard drive, he removed the drive (and
cleaned the computer and replaced the fan in the power supply) and now it will
not even display video. He tried a different video card and a different cpu.
He put the problem hard drive in another computer and discovered that it now
has a corrupted file structure. The previous hard drive would boot in Win95
but then not run Win95 - is there some way the computer could be messing up
the file structure? And then dying shortly afterwards? We have not checked
the previous hard drive for file structure.
|
keesan
|
|
response 226 of 269:
|
May 30 15:52 UTC 2002 |
Kiwanis does not have 900MHz phones, just 49MHz (lots of those for $2
untested). Does any grexer have an old pentium board that they do not want,
which has a 66MHz clock speed possibility (see jumpers)? We have plenty of
cases and components to put with it, and the cpu. Or more than one board -
we have LOTS of cases and 90-100MHz cpus.
|
keesan
|
|
response 227 of 269:
|
May 30 16:31 UTC 2002 |
We ran Setup. You go to Start, Run, type in setup, it looks in d:\win95\setup
(the file is in there because we copied all the CAB files there). Along the
way it asked for OEM number. It wanted the OLD number (already in use) not
the one in the setup file (new CAB files, which have an older date than the
old ones so I told it to keep the old ones).
Apparently in order to recognize a new motherboard it wants to completely
reinstall itself. We were able to do a custom install but I doubt that it
removed programs that were already on there. Fixed (I think).
Does anyone have a spare old pentium board to 'fix' our other problem with?
The desktop again has a 'setup MSN' icon which I deleted, again and I probably
have to delete the related files, again. They are persistent.
The CD-ROM drive is now recognized, as is the video card and hopefully the
sound card. I did not need thefiles that I downloaded for 1 hour yesterday.
Kiwanis had no 900 MHz cordless phones. Does any grexer have a broken one?
We do not need it to dial correctly, the battery can be dead, etc. Just needs
to be able to ring when someone calls. We will hook the headset up to a power
adaptor.
|
gull
|
|
response 228 of 269:
|
May 30 17:28 UTC 2002 |
I've seen them for $30 or less in stores. They're new enough that you
probably won't find one used.
|
keesan
|
|
response 229 of 269:
|
May 30 18:15 UTC 2002 |
Tim Ryan found one for $10. Three years ago Kiwanis was getting in broken
900 MHz phones and he managed to fix all of one (gave it to a friend) and one
other that he thought was fixed turns out not to work. So we would appreciate
anyone else's broken 900MHz if they have one. The $10 phones would be a 2 hour
trip for us to get, on unpleasant roads. We are in Ann Arbor, on bikes.
(Tim, let's see if we can round up a used one before you kindly offer to pick
us up new ones ;) ).
The newest Pentium (from Tim) is now working as a Win95 computer. It plays
CDs through the headphone jack on the drive, but the sound card will not work
- no sound. I reinstalled the Avance drivers (3.5M zip file). Still get a
message saying some export thing ending in dll:417 is missing and another file
refers to it. The neighbor will come take a look.
If you have autoexec.bat and config.sys set up to run a CD-ROM drive they take
up a lot of conventional RAM so my DOS browsers won't work. Maybe I can load
things high? Or just let Win95 have that computer and use another one for
DOS. The Win95 computer is supposed to be an internet radio and it can also
be a CD player as we have no other use for the CD-ROM drive.
|
tpryan
|
|
response 230 of 269:
|
May 30 22:28 UTC 2002 |
Circuit City has simple 900mhz phone from Vtech for $5.
probably on sale.
|
keesan
|
|
response 231 of 269:
|
May 30 23:02 UTC 2002 |
Is Circuit City in Ann Arbor? Is it returnable if it does not have the range
that we need.
The dll problem was that our file was an older version than some otherfile
referred to because our CAB files were from another computer and were older
than the files on this computer. I must have hit No instead of Yes at one
point for keep this file. Our neighbor brought over a newer yet file but we
still have problems - it refuses to run theprogram = it caused an exception
in kernel32.dll which he says is the core program. He suggests that we do
a 'setup' (reinstall) again from his version on top of all the mishmash of
old files.
Jim used PQMagic to resize the cluster size from 32K to 16K and now itis
defragging. Lots of extra space on the drive now because there were lots of
files under 32K and also under 16K that fit in half the space now.
|
keesan
|
|
response 232 of 269:
|
May 31 01:43 UTC 2002 |
About 100M freed up out of the original 700M of files.
|
keesan
|
|
response 233 of 269:
|
Jun 5 14:07 UTC 2002 |
Does WinXP come with a Backup program? My brother replaced his flaky laptop
with a new model and cannot find a Backup program. Win95 has one. Or are
there any good shareware programs for Backup?
|
keesan
|
|
response 234 of 269:
|
Jun 5 19:52 UTC 2002 |
People at my translations agencies are all going modern and sending images
instead of faxes. Today I got:
1) a 256-greyscale gif turned sideways. My viewer program only rotates
clockwise so I had to do three rotations and THEN reduce to 2-color (it won't
rotate anyting but 256 color).
2) two color jpegs (fortunately they appear to have used 0% reduction so I
could read it anyway). I asked both these people to send monochrome gifs.
3) now three MSWORD files to be translated, which presumably were scanned.
Someone somewhere must know how to make a monochrome gif in 300x300 dpi (the
first one was at screen resolution). A guy in Moscow did a good job of it.
In the middle of all this one of my modems started working only
intermittently, and both floppy drives may be intermittently bad as well and
may also be destroying floppy disks (the ones I made for Jim to use to test
the modem in another computer were all bad). Bad luck comes in sevens?
|
keesan
|
|
response 235 of 269:
|
Jun 5 20:03 UTC 2002 |
The first WORD file has no text in it at all.
|
keesan
|
|
response 236 of 269:
|
Jun 5 21:15 UTC 2002 |
It was a Winfax file embedded in a WORD file. First he faxed it to his own
computer. This time he scanned and sent a BW gif. I am always amazed at the
new formats people come up with for sending images.
|
keesan
|
|
response 237 of 269:
|
Jun 5 21:37 UTC 2002 |
He sent three files this time - two gif and one WORD (; .
|
keesan
|
|
response 238 of 269:
|
Jun 8 02:40 UTC 2002 |
Which HP inkjet printers work with DOS and Win31? Win31 lists PLUS and 500
- do later models use the same driver? We have one that works with Win31 and
Win95 (came with drivers) but not with DOS. Yesterday I tried to translate
from three image files at the same time - left, right, and the client's
attempt at a translation of this same page. Got to start printing and the
HP gives better resolution output than a dot matrix (assuming they scanned
at HP 300x300 resolution or more).
|
keesan
|
|
response 239 of 269:
|
Jun 8 15:29 UTC 2002 |
I just installed HP scanner software for Win31. It refuses to install if you
remove the compressed tif (ti_) files from Disk3. So I made a very short file
out of the first three characters of one ti_ file, copied it to all six .ti_
files (flower, girl, penguin, etc.), and it got upset at the files being the
wrong length but let me continue anyway. This saves us about 2M and one
floppy disk for storing the software on. I also discovered that 95% of our
1.44 floppy disks have bad sectors and are not large enough to be Disk1
(1.44K), that disk2 is only 1.2K (why could they not have averaged it?) and
that disk 3 fits together with disk 2 on one disk once you shorten the tiffs.
If anyone wants a 2-disk set of HP Scanjet 3p files let me know. Jim says
we could also have expanded the five files left on disk 3 after deleting the
tifs with expand.exe and put them somewhere (where?, probably in c:\scanjet).
Windows programs don't like to let the user have control.
Only about half of our 720 floppy disks and almost none of our 360K ones have
bad sectors. Jim says they are more forgiving due to larger domains. I will
stick with 360s for my translation business. MCRS disagrees that the older
ones last longer.
I was also not allowed to delete norton.txt from Disk 1 (an explanation of
how to use the scanner with Norton utilities) - it would not install. Dumb.
|
tpryan
|
|
response 240 of 269:
|
Jun 8 18:38 UTC 2002 |
Blank CD-Rs are now selling for less than 50 cents in bulk.
Easy to find them nearer to 30 cents each on sale. Down to 5 cents
if you want to jump thru rebate hoops. That's 650 to 700 meg,
depending on your recorder. Beats the 35 cents per 1.4 meg floopy
when bought in blocks of at least 25.
|
keesan
|
|
response 241 of 269:
|
Jun 8 20:11 UTC 2002 |
But our floppy disks, along with our floppy drives, are an inexhaustible free
resource and none of my translations are anywhere near 700M (more like 20K
at most). Our friend brought over a little insertable memory chip with 32M
on it, that he backs up files to. We got all our floppy drives to behave
perfectly and I have been reformatting disks before use.
Win95 refuses to let me install it from the B version - keeps crashing every
time during setup. It has been suggested that we wipe the drive clean,
repartition again (one primary, three extended) and reformat again. And if
that does not work, move all the innards to one of the computers that LK is
due to bring any minute now. There are reasons Borders was getting rid of
Pentiums when they were still rare beasts. DOS works fine on the machine.
I have spent 10-12 hours trying to make Windows work. 'I hate Windows' but
we have not found a DOS color scanner. Does LINUX have drivers for HP color
scanners? I am told it does Realaudio.
|
twinkie
|
|
response 242 of 269:
|
Jun 9 23:46 UTC 2002 |
Try looking for older Umax SCSI scanners. They'll work with Windows 3.1 (and
possibly DOS)
To my knowledge, there are no HP DeskJet printers beyond the 500-series
(540/560) that HP supports for versions of Windows prior to '95
Windows XP does not have a native backup program. It was replaced with System
Restore, because it's becoming less and less common for people to have backup
drives on their workstations.
The installation sequence program for most HP drivers (most drivers, actually)
checks to make sure your disk set has all of the files it should have. This
is a quality control feature, and not a limitation of Windows. I'm not clear
as to why you would want to delete files from driver disks, though...I think
the technology has hit a point where it's not very useful to be so stingy with
floppy space.
At what point is Windows 95 crashing? During hardware detection? License
entry? You may have flaky hardware that DOS/3.11 doesn't notice as being quite
so flaky.
|
keesan
|
|
response 243 of 269:
|
Jun 10 01:34 UTC 2002 |
We have an HP monochrome scanner and an HP 820 color printer both of which
have drivers for Win31 but I use DOS. I have put Win31 on one old computer
to use specifically with this scanner and printer.
I did not want to waste a floppy disk as well as space on my hard drive (which
means more files to check every time I defrag or virus check) for a bunch of
2M sample image files, or for notes on how to use this scanner with software
that I don't have. I always delete irrelevant files from my programs. This
one refuses to run without being able to tell me how to use it with NOrton
Utilities, or without a picture of a penguin or a Girl1.
Windows was crashing consistently during hardware detection. Thanks for the
hint - we will try it without the CD-ROM drive and sound card and see if it
works better, before doing a repartition and reformat and reinstall (or
recycle). We have lots of other sound cards and CD-ROM drives. We had
switched from an S3 to a Trident video card because the former had a curled
over edge that prevented us from putting it in the bottom slot, and it was
not having this problem before the switch (it was having other problems,
though, which is why we switched the card and then tried to reinstall). There
may be something wrong with the file structure unless we have fixed that.
Maybe I will try a different Trident video card first as we have another
similar one that takes the same driver.
|
twinkie
|
|
response 244 of 269:
|
Jun 10 03:05 UTC 2002 |
I'm not doubting that they exist, but I've never seen a color scanner that
had DOS support. I would imagine one would be very difficult to find, short
of finding one nearly a decade old on eBay. I would go as far as saying that
it would be nearly impossible to find one made after 1994 that had full DOS
support.
I'm fairly certain that the HP 800-series needs the HP Print Manager (or
something like that) to work. I know without a doubt that the 700-series needs
the Print Manager to spool, and presumably, every subsequent series needs
this. The reason being that HP started making "dumb" printers that didn't need
to "think" about how to deal with color. By making your computer sort it out,
it makes for a printer that's less expensive to produce. I tried (with minimal
success) to get my old 760 working in Linux, and eventually gave up.
Is it the installation program that won't work without those files, or does
the hardware not work, when you delete them from your hard drive? It shouldn't
matter to the computer if you delete the files after the driver and print/scan
manager is installed, unless the drivers use the files for color-matching.
Really old Umax Vista-series scanners would reference a TIFF of a parrot
before scanning, if I recall correctly, and simply would not work without that
file in tact.
If your system in crashing during hardware detection, the first thing I'd do
is remove the sound card. They're nasty little beasts, when it comes to
installing Windows...especially if they aren't made by Creative, or aren't
true plug-and-play (jumperless). It's doubtful that your CD-ROM would be the
culprit, unless it's a very old 2X or 4X that isn't ATAPI compliant. (Though,
most 2X, and nearly all 4X drives should work just fine with Windows 95-native
drivers, as long as you have them plugged in to their appropriate interface
cards, if they're not ATAPI compliant)
There is also a chance that Windows '95 doesn't like your S3 card. I had
problems getting my system going with an S3 Trio card I had a few years ago.
If you get far enough for the Windows installation to offer you an opportunity
to provide your own drivers, I'd try to get some updated video drivers. It
could make your installation much smoother.
The Windows installer shouldn't care about your file structure, unless you've
tinkered with c:\windows\system, c:\windows\system32, or their subdirectories.
The only caveat being if you have a non-MS DOS installed with a version higher
than 6.22. I remember reading about DR-DOS and IBM PCDOS users having a
difficult time installing Windows 95, because the IO.SYS file looked newer
than Microsoft's version, so the '95 installer wouldn't change it to 4.0.95
|
keesan
|
|
response 245 of 269:
|
Jun 10 16:07 UTC 2002 |
I may try getting hold of an HP Deskjet 500 to see if it works with DOS, but
we have a quart of HP ink that may not work in it.
I can delete the girl and penguin after installation and it works - the
on-screen matching program (grey to be matched against BW stripes) does not
use those tiffs. But I wanted to reduce the installation disks to 2 instead
of 3 floppy disks. Seems like any file with the same name as the ti_ files
is accepted as long as you tell it during setup to ignore the wrong length.
The S3 card seemed to work okay - we were not having setup problems with it
but were after trading it for a Trident card. However I could NOT get the
sound card to work, which is why I was reinstalling Win95 (a later version).
It is an Alsound, not Creative. We have a Vibra16 that I can substitute.
Cd-ROM is our newest, an 8X BTC. I could not get another Alsound card to work
with Win31 - no sound, just pictures.
Thanks for all the hints. We will switch back to the S3 and if that does not
help, remove the sound card and try again. (Then remove scanner card).
|
keesan
|
|
response 246 of 269:
|
Jun 11 18:14 UTC 2002 |
Twinkie was right, it was a problem of Windows being fussier than DOS about
hardware. But it was not the sound card, or video card, or scanner card.
Yesterday we dropped off some boards at Friedman's to recycle. And took home
all the 72-pin SIMMs that someone else had left off. Tested them in a 486
and they were all 4, 8 or 16M. Six of them did nothing so we decided, since
we were already opening up the Pentium (they are both ATT) to test the SIMMS
in there. The ATT lets you put in one SIMM at a time rather than pairs, so
we had switched two 8's to another computer from there and put in one 16 and
one blank slot (adding an 8 to the blank slot did not increase recognized
RAM).
We took out all the old RAM and tested one 4M SIMM and Win95 took off running
and finished checking hardware and I was able to get it all working with
Netscape and Realaudio with 4M RAM (installed, did not go online). A bit
slow, of course.
We put in 2x8 plus 4x4 of the recently acquired RAM, deleted all the MSN and
Online signup junk all over the placed, ran defrag, and then I tried out the
sound again. CD-ROM as usually played fine out the front, but not out the
sound card. It is the same card that it came with, Alsound, for which it was
set up. I redownloaded and reinstalled alsound, same results.
I went to DOS and ran dosinst.exe for the Alsound card and it insisted on
copying all the same files over into the same directory (warning me that they
might be older) or would not run (typical of Windows). I then ran the install
program. Got the default settings for IRQ DMA etc. Also the message
'Invalid sound card'.
The thing is labelled ALS100 and I got that driver. The same driver was in
the original computer with that card. Presumably they once had it running.
I suspect this is actually an invalid message and what they meant to say is
that the card is dead. I will try a Creative Vibra16 or possibly our other
Alsound if I can find it (it worked in DOS, at least).
So we had two hardware problems. Thanks again for pointing us to the fact
that Win95 always crashed while checking hardware.
I discovered that S3 cards do not support text modes in more than 80 columns,
unlike Tseng, Trident, Cirrus, ATI, Everex, Video 7, Compaq, etc. At least
they do not supply a mode command, or .vrs drivers for WP51. I got the entire
set of WP51 vrs drivers known to Corelle in one big file (but they missed the
Cirrus CLMODE and cirrus.vrs files). S3 cards work fine with Windows. So
do Trident cards, but they are not as VESA compatible (only go to 800 res.
in VESA mode, at least our 1994 PCI cards do that). Tseng does it all. Does
Cirrus make PCI video cards?
|
twinkie
|
|
response 247 of 269:
|
Jun 11 18:24 UTC 2002 |
Glad to hear you're at least progressing :)
Cirrus Logic stopped making video cards a few years ago. Now they make
embedded components.
You might try scavenging around for a Number 9 card. Although N9 isn't making
video cards anymore (which I personally consider tragic) I suspect they're
one of the few companies who would have included that type of support in their
products. Matrox might, as well...but even old Matrox cards can be a bit
expensive.
|
keesan
|
|
response 248 of 269:
|
Jun 12 00:49 UTC 2002 |
Thanks for all the ideas, but actually S3 does do 132 column mode, in fact
it runs up to 200 if you have a card with enough RAM and a big enough monitor
(1600 res). A nice guy with a WPDOS site had a pointer to a generic mode
command that works with Cirrus and S3 perfectly, and he steered me to a Compaq
site with the WP drivers for S3, and they work perfectly. LK gave us two more
S3 cards. I also got a long list of mode numbers for a large number of video
cards and most of them seem to do 132 columns in at least 25 lines. Some do
100, or 144, or other numbers of columns.
Our video cards are 256K (plain VGA) or 512K (800 -256 colors) or 1M (we move
around the chips between them to increase the RAM) for 1024-256. THe PCI
video cards and some of the VLB cards can be upgraded to 2M (again, we move
around the RAM chips to the cards that benefit, Trident not being one of those
as it will do only 256 colors at 1024, and not in VESA mode). How much RAM
is now common in video cards? Ours are 1994 or older.
LK gave us a few sound cards, one of which is PCI. Why might Realaudio
require 16 bit sound cards? We may recycle the 8-bit cards.
Who makes video cards nowadays? Tseng also stopped. Is Trident still around?
S3? We have old cards made by Everex, NCR, ATI, Paradise, Realtek, Tseng,
Trident, Cirrus, and one made in Japan with no name on it. They are varying
degrees of VESA compatible even after running a VESA driver. One card was
said to have more VESA modes than native modes. I have some cards that are
VESA 1.2, one VESA 1.1, some VESA 2.0 - what standard are they at by now and
what is considered normal max resolution now?
|
keesan
|
|
response 249 of 269:
|
Jun 12 02:34 UTC 2002 |
The guy helping me with text video drivers asks for recommendations on S3
video cards. All I know is the 1994 or earlier models and that 2M RAM and
VESA 2.0 gets you higher resolution and more colors. Anyone know more? I
will suggest that he visit grex.
|