by SpiritWolf on Sat Jul 07, 2001 7:43 am
Erm. They're BSing you frankly, what they're <I>really</I> saying is that they can't afford to train tech help people to deal with any problems that occur on Windows 95, even though the systems are nigh identical. All I'm advising though is that before you actually buy a new OS (I'll provide a link as soon as I find one cheap enough), try the drivers on Win95. Five'll get you ten that they'll work.<P>You do realize that you don't have to format your drive to reinstall, right? ;> Again, this is a lazy tech help person's solution to everything, people may tell you that a reinstall is best but that's bull too, all it does is deletes all the data on your drive and defragments it, you can do the same amount of good by running defrag after installing your fresh new OS. How can you install a new OS though if your old OS is still there? Simple, you drop to DOS and you back up your stuff out of C:WINDOWS then you delete C:WINDOWS, no format needed. After you've done that you can reinstall and all your data will still be totally intact because you didn't delete it, you only deleted C:WINDOWS.<P>If you need instructions on how to do that, I can provide them for you. That's no trouble either.<P>[Edit]<P>Note, where I say 'back up' above, what I mean is that you move the stuff out of your C:WINDOWS dir to a temporary directory on your hard disk, so you can say move your fonts dir from C:WINDOWSFONTS to C:TEMPFONTS, same with your favourites folder, your IE5 history and all the rest.<P>[Edit 2]<P>Ah, damn. Hang on. If you were to do that, you'd need to know someone with a Win98 machine, you'd need to use SYS C: A: to get their system boot from their system (onto a disk) and then use SYS A: C: to get that back off the disk onto your system so you can fool it into thinking you have a Windows 98 system. That may be a bit fiddly if you're new to this. Although I could easily write batches (automated files) to get you through most of it, I'm just thinking of the upgrade, that's just a world of hurt and useless if you ever format (won't install on a clean drive, you have to install 95 first).<P>Hrm ... well, I'll leave this up to you as to what you want to do, make your decision and all but rest assured, if you do need to upgrade and you want it without Windows being all buggered, then I can instruct you how. If you don't, I'll have to find an upgrade edition. Most importantly though, test your drivers with 95, as I said, I'm 90% certain they'll work, the only reason they wouldn't is if the company programmed them not to work on 95 (put in an OS check) which is plausible but I doubt it (they'd be cutting out part of their userbase).<P>[Edit 3]<P>... and if you can see this, you don't have eyestrain and you won't sue me, yay!<p>[This message has been edited by SpiritWolf (edited 07-07-2001).]