Compaq 5170 help !!

mgmguy1

Dear All
I am troubleshooting a clients pc and I am running into some issues.
I need your help.

Compaq 5170 specs:
Processor Type Intel Pentium II 350 MHz
Installed Memory 256 MB (SDRAM)
Hard Drive 10 GB DMA/ATA-33 (Ultra)
PCI Fast Ethernet DEC 21143-based Adapter
Operating System Microsoft Windows 98 4.10.1998

Here's some of the issues I have been haveing>
Windows 98 will not defrag or scandisk in Normal mode.
In normal mode Scandisk won run because it says i need to Defragemnt the Hard drive. Windows 98 Defragmentor will not work because there is not enough memorey to run the Program.

Some things I have done.
I ctrl-alt-del all open programs, went into the config.sys files and added the statement DOS=HIGH,UMB
I ALSO PUT A STACKS-9,256 AS WELL AS FILES=30 AND BUFFERS=15,0
IF ANYBODY HAS A BETTER OPTIMIZED CONFIG.SYS TEMPLET let me know.

Also the eathenet card on the compaq is a 10/mb/1mb card. Would this be able to used a 10/100 Linksys router ?

If any of you have a suggestion please let me know. I am going to be here all day.
ICQ# 134585975

MGMGUY1

Webmaster

Optimizing the config.sys won't help a bit for Win98...

Have you tried the System Monitor to see if there is actuall memory available? Also, if I remember correctly, Windows 98 only actually uses the first 128 MB.

My guess is that it has nothing to do with memory shortage, often the error message displayed is totally 'off-topic'. Did you search in the microsoft knowledge base yet?

Also the eathenet card on the compaq is a 10/mb/1mb card. Would this be able to used a 10/100 Linksys router ?

Sure, but it might be necessary to set the ports on both site fixed at 10 Mbps (not auto-sensing).

mgmguy1

Dear all,
New news,
O'k I found on the Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 132832 what I have been dealing with. I also found some simler articles on how to fix my issue. What's being asked of me to do is to make some changes to the config.sys file and the system ini file.
My problem is the System.ini file is BLANK !! The Autoexec.bat file has some gibberish on it as well.
Now I know in windows 98 the registery keeps 5 saves of the System.bat and the User.bat files.
Now My money is on some or all of the 5 back-ups are corrupted.

Does anybody have any suggestions ?

carbunkle

I've seen computers with empty system.ini files its nothing to worry about. And 256 MB on windows 98 should be more then enough. I would use a 3rd party defragment program if the MS one wont work.

KDE

I worked on a computer that was doing pretty much the same thing. It turned out to be the hard drive was bad. And it was a new WD 30 GB.

I could put a saved ghost image on it and it would work, but I couldn't defrag or scnadisk or fomat it for that matter.

Try doing a scandisk surface scan from a 98 boot disk.

I could do a scandisk full surface scan with a boot disk and it would get to the same spot everytime and give me errors.

bellboy

try to get hold of norton system commander. older versions are usually cheaper (wasn't 2001 released to cope with me/w2k and 2002 to cope with xp?). a lot of the utils can be run from the cd-rom (such as the disk tools ), and it's probably better that way, as a lot of people have complained over the years that actually installing the software and letting it work in the background is a bad idea.

once norton sorts out any disk issues, it could be possible to run the regular windows utils.