My machine is pretty old (5 years!) - 4 GB hard drive, 64 MB Ram, Windows 98, slowish processor, only about 130 MB free. I run Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Ad-Aware, Spybot, Norton Internet Security and the Norton Utilities package.
A few days ago, I decided to defragment the hard drive using the NU Speed Disk (can never seem to get the defrag in Windows System Tools to work, keeps restarting and I can't work out what's writing to the disk that causes this). Anyway, one of the features in Norton Utilities is called "Image", which started to run while the defrag was in progress. It slowed the whole thing up drastically - even if I clicked "Stop" and closed it, Image would still try to run again a moment later. Even after stopping it by using Ctrl/Alt/Del and selecting End Task (for Image), the defrag proceeded extremely slowly - and the display seemed to indicate that the fragmentation was far worse than before. I left it to run overnight, but by the end of the following day it was still virtually at the same point as about 30 hours before.
Thinking that the process was still being held up by Image (or perhaps some other programme) trying to run while the defrag was ongoing, I stopped the defrag and ran msconfig to restart the machine in safe mode, so that no other programmes would be running. It still took about 15 hours for the defrag to complete, but finally it's done.
One aspect of running in safe mode seems to be that the colour display defaults to 16 colours, and the screen size goes down to 640 x 480 pixels. However, this restores to 256 colours and 800 x 600 once I'm running normally again.
The problem this time is that today, once I ran msconfig to restore the selective startup, the machine did not restore to my normal colour and display settings. No problem, thought I, as I changed the settings, hit Apply, and restarted the computer at the prompt. D'oh! Still on 16 colours and 640 x 480. I've tried restarting 5 times, even just changing one thing at a time, and still no joy - it's as though I hit Cancel instead of Apply (and no, that's not the problem!).
I have pretty much reached the end of my limited PC knowledge. If it's something to do with having to edit the registry, I wouldn't have a clue what to do. I can't think of anything else to tell you, but if more information is needed to make a diagnosis I'll do my best. I hope someone can help as everything on my screen looks weird now - HJ's pic at the top of the page now puts me in mind of something from a movie like The Omen!
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andymc
Vroom, vroom - mmm, doughnuts ...
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Did you try clicking on OK as well as Apply?
Probably a daft question but I'm floundering too.
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Yep, did it both ways, no difference.
Couple of other things have occurred to me - when I restarted the computer in safe mode, it displayed a list of options on a DOS screen (ie not in Windows mode, but what the screen looks like before Windows loads, just ordinary characters on a black screen) - Normal and Safe mode were two of the options, I think there were another three but I can't remember what they were. At the time, I selected Safe mode. Perhaps I should go through that process again and see does the same list come up.
Also, when I restarted in normal windows mode, it asked me for a Windows password, something I don't remember seeing on this machine before. Luckily I remembered the correct password from years ago. I'm wondering if it has somehow logged me in as a different user, but there's no indication of that. Also, I don't remember creating a login user ID for myself, the computer is normally just switched on, loads various startup programmes such as NIS and PopUp Stopper etc, then asks me if I want to update NIS. No passwords or anything.
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andymc
Vroom, vroom - mmm, doughnuts ...
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Wouldn't worry about the options list - I have chosen to have that displayed for a few seconds on every bootup.
What does bother me from your description is that free space - windoze must really be struggling with that - is there something or some things you could do without to free up ideally another 3-400mB?
I'm not certain this could be strictly related to your video display problem, but reckon it would be a good basis to start sorting out from.
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One further thought - have you run scandisk at any time? If the bootsector has been corrupted it should find it and fix it.
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I ran the Norton System Check programme after the reboot to Normal, which only identified low memory (as usual) as a problem. It checks everything from disk integrity to registry errors. I know what you're saying about memory, I actually have plans to get a guy who knows about these things to cannibalise this machine and another one to create something with about treble the memory and processor speed. However, I just hadn't got around to it yet!
The main reason for the lack of memory is that there are a number of short mpegs (120 MB worth) of family videos that were taken with a now-defunct digital camera - these only exist on the hard drive and I was hoping the chap I mentioned would be able to transfer them somehow, as it is the only video footage of some important memories. All the mpegs are too big to transfer onto a floppy disk, so I can't transfer them that way. As it currently exists, the machine doesn't have any USB ports for those little keyring memory chips, and the printer port seems to no longer be recognised by the machine, plus there isn't a CD-writer drive - perhaps there's a way of attaching one of those keyring things via a USB to old-machine adapter type thingmy (always been one for precise descriptions!).
Anyway, that's a bit of a distraction right now. I'm still looking at a shrunken screen!
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andymc
Vroom, vroom - mmm, doughnuts ...
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One possible solution could be to put another HD in and transfer things like mpgs to that - your machine will be unusual if it doesn't have a spare plug on the ide ribbon and a spare power plug doing nothing.
You can pickup s/h drives very cheaply, esp the smaller 4-10gB ones, and double your capacity at a stroke.
Just wondering if all that defrag time has fried your vid card, or a bit of it? Try pushing it firmly into its slot for starters.
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"...D'oh! Still on 16 colours and 640 x 480..."
You may have accidentally forced this setting in msconfig. Check that "msconfig / general / advanced / VGA" isn't set.
Are you trying to change the settings by right-clicking on the desktop, then "Properties / Settings"? (This is the same as "Control Panel / Display / Settings").
On the settings screen, click "Advanced / Adapter". Is your video adapter correctly listed on the top line? If it isn't, this will explain your problem.
If it isn't correctly listed, check that the video adapter is listed in "Control Panel / System / Device Manager / Display Adapters". If it's not shown here (or marked with an error code), shut the machine down, remove & reinsert the adapter in a different slot, power up and look again. If it is still not there, you may have a duff video adapter.
Let us know what you find.
Ian
(By "correctly listed", I mean it should show the brand name of your video card, not just a generic term such as "Video Adapter")
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Wow. There's a lot of info here to dissect!
1) The presence of MPEGs on disk will have no effect on free memory - on free disk space, yesy, but not free memory. Where are you seeing this message? (There are different places to see available mem in Win98, and often they are not referring to physical memory but to a fixed part of memory e.g. GDI, which might be consistent with your display problems)
2) Well done for stopping the IMAGE. That shouldn't have caused a problem. Not should stopping the DEFRAG, so long as you did it by stopping it properly rather than jst turning off the computer or ctrl/alt/delete. If defrag is "crashed" and it happened to be at an important file (e.g. the registry) then that file is likely to have been trashed. (Defrag picks up files segments at a time and moves them to the free space to allow it to move the next segment of the file next to the existing one. With a small amount of free space it will not be able to do this efficiently. If it was mid-move when crashed, then it will have lost track of what it was dealing with and where it dumped it).
IMHO defrag is pretty useless these days. it used to be invaluable when disks were slow and having a file contigious made for faster reads, as the heads didn't have to skip around looking for the next part of the file. Defrag could also sometimes save a little space, which used to be important too.
But now modern disks are much faster, and the newer ones have 8mb or more cache which predictively loads data anyway, so defrag really is a waste of time and effort in most instances.
3) You will probably need to reload the drivers for your video card to recover your screen size. Although display problem could be entirely due to lack of free space, and not enough room for swapfile to extend into. Or your registry could be damaged.
4) From memory, Windows password only happens when it thinks Windows networking is present. Clicking cancel causes it not to appear again...?
Conclusion - free up some disk space asap and see what happens.
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But now modern disks are much faster, and the newer ones have >> 8mb or more cache
>>
defrag in this case may have been a good idea - bearing in mind that he has a 4mb disk over 5 years old. but than he has very little unused disk space and so the first port of call should have been to get rid of redundant files.
agreed - re the confusion between ram memory and disk storage space.
as for original query - see a previous volume where i replied to similar/same question by "hf" . a forum search should discover the details.
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Wow, a lot of stuff to digest here. Thanks to all for taking the time to reply. I'll try to go through all this step by step.
"Check that "msconfig / general / advanced / VGA" isn't set."
It's not - in fact, that option is greyed out and it seems I can't change it from what it currently is even if I want to.
"Are you trying to change the settings by right-clicking on the desktop, then "Properties / Settings"? (This is the same as "Control Panel / Display / Settings")."
Yes, that's what I was doing.
"On the settings screen, click "Advanced / Adapter". Is your video adapter correctly listed on the top line? If it isn't, this will explain your problem."
It says the Adapter is Intel 740 AGP. I'm guessing that's correct as I don't know what else could/should be there.
"If it isn't correctly listed, check that the video adapter is listed in "Control Panel / System / Device Manager / Display Adapters".
It shows the same thing there. Plus, when I click on its Properties, it says "This device is working correctly." - I guess that means it's probably as it should be?
However, scrolling further down the System Devices list in Device Manager, I saw an exclamation mark beside Direct Memory Access Controller. Clicking on its Properties brought the following up:
"The VDMAD.VXD device loader(s) for this device could not load the device driver (Code 2). To fix this, click Update Driver to update the device driver."
However, when I did this it ended telling me that "the best driver Windows found is already installed for this device."
"1) The presence of MPEGs on disk will have no effect on free memory - on free disk space, yes, but not free memory."
Sorry, I should have said disk space. I see a message about this any time Norton System Check runs (I set it to run once a week in order to try and keep the machine working at its best) - it always flags up that there is only 2 or 3% free space. I really don't want to delete those mpegs for sentimental reasons, but I'll explore transferring them (or getting someone else to!)
"2) Well done for stopping the IMAGE. That shouldn't have caused a problem. Not should stopping the DEFRAG, so long as you did it by stopping it properly rather than jst turning off the computer or ctrl/alt/delete. If defrag is "crashed" and it happened to be at an important file (e.g. the registry) then that file is likely to have been trashed."
Ah. This may have happened, as one of the times that Image tried to run (the darn thing just wouldn't quit!), it froze the computer while the defrag was in progress when I clicked Stop. I got the blue screen with the message about the system being unstable - however, clicking any key to return to Windows produced no result, nor did pressing Ctrl/Alt/Del to restart. After waiting nearly an hour, I guessed it wasn't going to unfreeze so I (reluctantly) switched it off at the power button, then back on again a few minutes later. Image tried to run, then flashed up a message saying it couldn't run because the drive was 91% fragemented, and to defragment the drive ...
"3) You will probably need to reload the drivers for your video card to recover your screen size. Although display problem could be entirely due to lack of free space, and not enough room for swapfile to extend into. Or your registry could be damaged."
I've run Norton System Check since all this happened, but it didn't flag up anything about registry problems. Since it has caught this once or twice in the past, I'm guessing that it would have done so this time. I've also run Windows Update, just in case that spotted anything missing, but no joy there either.
"4) From memory, Windows password only happens when it thinks Windows networking is present. Clicking cancel causes it not to appear again...?"
I thought so too but when I tried that, it told me it was an incorrect password - hmm, or was that when I just hit Return without typing anything? I'll double check that at the next restart.
"as for original query - see a previous volume where i replied to similar/same question by "hf" . a forum search should discover the details."
I think that brings me to a similar point as before, where it says the best driver for the is already loaded.
GNNNN!! 8-(
I am very grateful for all this advice, please keep it coming!
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andymc
Vroom, vroom - mmm, doughnuts ...
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andymc -
1. try removing graphics card, and then re-instaling it, followed by the instructions as given in section 3 of
www.exonet.com.ar/drivers/Video/Intel%20740%20AGP%...0(art.945)/WIN9X/README.TXT
2. if you do not have the drivers, try
support.intel.com/support/graphics/intel740/
and
downloadfinder.intel.com/scripts-df/filter_results...1
if you give more details of your hardware, motherboard, monitor, video card etc., it might help trace your problem.
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