On Friday I stopped by my aunt’s house to do some free tech support on her new PC that wouldn’t start up. Yes, I’m a sucker and I do all the tech support my family. Of course when I came in, the PC booted up normally for the first time in over a week. It figures. :P
I started peeking in the EventViewer for any strage system errors, and tried to find the stupid Dell Diagnostics CD. 5 minutes in I got a BSOD with a nice stop message, and on subsequent boot the hard drive was reported missing. After a short WTF moment, I cracked the case open, disconnected the IDE ribbon, and connected it back in. The system booted back up normally. Must have been a loose connection or something…
Just to be sure I ran Dell diagnostics on all the hardware, and called Dell to see if I can bum some new hardware off of them. But since all the tests passed they decided that my diagnosis was correct. Not much help there, but my aunt felt reassured that Dell specialist concurred with my diagnosis.
Since I was at the house, I also was told to take a look at my cousin’s desktop and her son’s laptop. The laptop was an easy fix. The kid cracked the screen, so there was noting I could do. Since the machine was out of warranty, I recommended that they buy a used display for $150 on ebay (new one would cost them around $300) and I will install it for them.
Desktop turned out to be a total nightmare. It was an ancient Compaq Presario running Win98 with 64 megs of RAM and more spyware than you can shake your stick at.
What do I do? Run Spybot on it!
It found over 60 different items, and around 15 of them could not be removed without rebooting. Logically, I restarted the machine as instructed.
Apparently, whatever happened during the cleanup process has hosed windows installation. I was greeted with the initial Windows setup screen asking me for the license key. At that point it was already 1 AM, and since no one knew where to find the original Win98 CD I decided to call it a day and come back on Saturday.
In 5 minutes I turned a slow but usable machine to unusable piece of junk. Great! I bet I will hear snippy comments from my family about my supposed “computor skills” for months now…
In the meantime my cousin found the Windows CD and went through that setup dialog. When I came in, the machine would boot into windows and then suffer from critical explorer error leaving you with a blank screen and a pointer.
Windows was totally hosed. I don’t think I could do anything to save it at this point. But there’s nothing a quick parallel install would not fix, right?
Hell no.
Win98 wouldn’t boot off of the CD. The default order of boot devices on most machines is Floppy, HD, CD. You just need to go into BIOS and switch the last two whenever you need to do some maintenance. Nowadays most manufacturers provide some sort of boot menu (for example on dell systems you can get to it by pressing F12 on POST screen). Unfortunately Compaq was not that nice. There was no visible POST screen on the machine. There was no “Press Dell to enter Setup” or anything like that. Just a gianormus company logo.
I tried pressing F1, F2, Del and just about any other key on the keyboard but nothing worked. There was just no way to access BIOS on that machine.
I dug out the user manual (which was of course no help) and dialed the tech support number hell bent on making the dude on the other line tell me how to get there. When I went through a nice voice recognition menu, the machine cheerfully told me that support for my model was discontinued. :x
That’s ok, though. You can just boot yourself into DOS, switch to the E: drive and run the installation program from there. Right?
Wrong! That would be too easy. The CD drive just didn’t exist under DOS. Apparently Compaq uses hardware that is not compatible with fucking anything. And it was not even a SCISI drive! It was a standard IDE drive – but neither Windows boot disk, nor DSL boot floppy could detect it.
Quick google for drivers returned only some proprietary Compaq stuff for Win 95-98. Nothing that would work under DOS.
I decided to take the system home and play around with it some more. I was entirely convinced that if I could find a normal CD-ROM all my problems would be fixed.
I found appropriate drive in some really old junker that was rusting in my attic. I swapped them out and I was good to go. Win98 boot disk detected the drive, and I was able to run the setup application from command line. :mrgreen:
Of course the install completely b0rked MS office, media player and IE. They needed to be downloaded and reinstalled.
Did I mention that this machine had no ethernet card? Yes, it was using some strange USB adapter which of course I didn’t take with me. I ended up downloading things on my desktop, burning them on a CD, and then installing it on the other machine. I could not find full installation file for IE 6, so I had to wait till my cousin brings the stupid adapter in.
After that, I called my cousin to ask her if she still has the original Office cd’s. Our conversation went a little bit like this:
Me: Do you still have the original Microsoft Office CD’s?
Her: Microsoft what?
Me: You know, Word, Excel – that stuff.
Her: I need CD’s for that?
Me: Uh, never mind… I’ll figure something out… :roll:
I only had Office XP and 2003 CD’s at my house and they would not work with Win98. So I ended up installing Abiword on the system so that she can at least open MS word documents. Hopefully I can find the stupid CD’s when I go to her house today to return the machine. And if not, she will have to manage with Abiword for now.
Most of my weekend was wasted fighting with that infernal machine. Sigh…
[tags]tech support, family, family tech support, win 98, copaq, presario, cd-rom, cd, dos[/tags]