Hey all,
After a month of puter problems, I am at the point of attempting a reformat of my drive. The problem being I do not have the correct restore cds for my pc. I used the recovery disk that was given to me when I purchased the pc and it is a Win 98 not a ME. The store is in another state and not really worth the hassle to track down, if all else fails, I can buy another OS. I was wondering if it was possible to use the options folder in Windows? I already attempted to re-install while my puter was running, and it did fix many of the errors I had. Yet, I still have many more.
My thorn in my side is a: 3 year old Gateway Intel Celeron 700mhz. I have a 20 gb IDE 7M hard drive, 158 mb of memory, and of course it is running winme. One of the strange things that is going on is that in certain tweaks I have downloaded for it, the os is recognized as a win98.
A little background; a "friend" of mine tried to install home networking on the puter so he and my hubby could use same internet connection for online gaming. This failed miserably and after 2 days of him trying, I finally put my foot down and told him he could not try any longer. The pc was online via a dial up networking and was "hit" constantly for the next few days it was operational. Even though I told him not to, he messed around with Zone Alarms, and ILLEGALLY upgraded it. I must mention this and the other illegal games upgrades etc. he installed on my pc were done in the middle of the night when I was not aware of it. The last time I tried to uninstall Zonealarms(free edition) I lost my internet connection as well, I was online, I was not able to open any websites though.
Anyway, a program file appears on my desktop called, "Second thought" and after this happened I closed internet connection and tried to delete. My Norton was disabled, regcleaner, and The Cleaner all showed no viruses. I ran Ad-aware and about 25 spywares came up, I cleaned them and restarted, after the restart they were still there. The windows logon disappearred, and even though I finally was able to connect after MUCHO tweaking, I am still unable to view websites. The VGA display adapter was one thing that was messed up, the cd-rom was not recognized. Umm what else? The printer went haywire, and even though I removed it and several other tasks in startup list from msconfig, they kept reappearing. Too many to list really, and you all have probably stopped reading this. haha
Where I am now...I now have a windows logon, Ad-aware comes up clean, I have done some major work on the registry and physically removed the smc card. My system device manager is showing two keyboards and mouses(mice) lol I removed Earthlink and Aol from my machine, yet their shortcuts are EVERYWHERE! I even went so far as removed Netmeeting in registry, because it would not remove from Add-remove programs(windows setup) list. I had many, many spywares, and possibly a virus with the Second thought program, also I I have a "Patch exe" file that I remember I had to remove a few years ago associated with another virus, how it reappeared I have no idea. My startup list only lists what it is supposed to, yet I cannot load the Earthlink or Aol software disks, the error message is that they is a newer version already installed. I am able to get online via dial up networking, but no go on the webpages. Oh one more thing, I cannot upgrade the Internet Explorer to 6. In the system information there are 4 problem devices showing:
ACPI IRQ Holder for PCI Irq error 22, Internet connection sharing error 2, Microsoft PS/2 Port Mouse error 15, Standard 101/102 Keyboar error 27. Also listed in Network under protocol is MS.w95.spi.tcp four different times, with different results in each.
I am just very dissapointed that I put so much hard work into this baby of mine, and it is still not working. I have already saved all my personal data, but I am dragging my feet at reformatting the drive. Also wondering if it is possible to use the Windows/options folder to do this. I have downloaded many tweaks from the net to diagnose all the problems and they have helped tremendously. Also you guys are a WEALTH of knowledge here. So any input will be appreciated and carried out. If reformatting is a must...how should I go about it?
Sorry this is so long, and if you have any questions I will be glad to answer. Thanks so MUCH! sorry for the typos!
