The Tech Corner
Below are some experiences I've had and hopefully
the information will keep you from going through
the same frustration and headaches I did
Packard Bell Technical Help Sites:
Ray's Packard Bell Website with lots of help for Packard Bell owners
Another unofficial Packard Bell Tech support site
For the number source of drivers.... try Windrivers
Here's a website with all kinds of drivers and Windows tips and help.
So you've got some Windows drivers missing? Here is a great place to find those drivers , and also some help in "tweaking" Windows 95 to run at top speed!
Checkout Your Windows System for Problems
HARDWARE INFO UTILITY. Residing within Windows 98 is a nice reporting feature known as the Hardware Info Utility. Get to it with Start|Run and enter "hwinfo /ui" (without the quotes, and be sure the space is entered before the /). The system summary and a list of the hardware, registry keys, and drivers are displayed. Of particular interest, errors are displayed in red, making it easy to identify and isolate any problems.
In the past 18 years I've handled, in one way or another, thousands of computer diskettes. When I started we didn't even have 3 1/2 diskettes. Through the years I've had diskettes go bad. And I've been called many times to try and recover data on a diskette that only gives that nasty "abort, retry or fail" error when you try to read it. We've all had that happen to us. More times than not, the pretty blue, red, yellow, green, etc., diskettes failed more often than the gray or black diskettes. Moral to the story: Save yourself a headache or two, don't use the pretty colored diskettes, ESPECIALLY for storing valuable data.
Have you ever had your Windows 95 mess up? How about your hard drive completely crash and lose everything? Most of the times when this happens, you will not have an accessible CD-ROM from which to reinstall Windows 95. So, it's important to have a Windows 95 Startup Disk that has all the necessary files on it so you can access the CD-ROM. Here is my experience in creating a Startup Disk.
Here is some good instructions as to the steps of connecting two PCs Windows using RJ45 cabling and two ethernet cards, plus much more on networking help.
If you own one of the IBM P/S2 model computers, and lost your Startup Disk or need other technical help with it, here's a good site with lots of tech help for the IBM P/S2 computers
Here is a piece of info sent to me by a reader about installing Window for the first time:
If you boot a new machine (no OS installed) and copy the .CAB files to c:\win98 directory and install windows from there you will not be prompted for a CD disk when making changes. Since it installs from there it sets that as the source and automatically looks there.
If you already have installed Windows on a machine you can edit the registry to reflect a new source path. Win98 requires editing of the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\WINDOWS\CURRENTVERSION\SETUP
once at that key edit the "SourcePath" to C:\Win98 or C:\Win95 assuming that is where you put the .CAB files. Once done you never get asked for the CD again, it just auto looks at C:\win98 or 95 and carries on.
For obvious reasons one wants to be somewhat careful when editing the registry files though. Somewhat easy to render a system unbootable :)