Replies

Charlotte,
Just FYI, I am running ZAP 6.0.063.003 (just came out a couple of days ago) with Diskeeper 8.0.478 on XPProSP2, and have had no problems at all with error messages. Both programs are co-existing quite nicely. I’ll bet you’re using Diskeeper 9. If you have a copy of Diskeeper 8, you might want to give that a try. Just a thought.
Liberty

John,
I haven’t run into this problem yet, but does pressing the Esc key do anything when this problem crops up?

A quicker, easier way might be to download a program such as CleanMOCache from http://www.buttuglysoftware.com/%5B/url%5D

Sorry — I meant to say “Guest,” not “Ghost.” Must have Norton on the mind today… Anyway, the utility you need to be able to do this is Iomega Guest.

Rather than fuss with floppies, why not try what I did when I installed Windows 95 on my 486? I put the contents of the Windows CD on a Zip disk, then was able to use the Zip disk’s Ghost utility to allow the parallel port zip drive to be assigned a drive letter in DOS. NB: you will have to use an OLD version of the Iomega drivers — a Zip Tools disk has this on it, but none of the recent Iomega software contains anything to allow the drive to be used in DOS. Once I’d booted into DOS — from a boot floppy — I could access the Zip drive and start the Windows setup executable file. As far as the Windows setup file was concerned, I was setting up from a CD, but all of the files were residing on a zip drive. You don’t need USB or a CD drive to make this method work, but you do need a working floppy drive and a working parallel port — as well as a parallel port Zip drive and an antique set of Zip drive drivers. It works every time…

All of the above posts seem valid — most likely, it’s a bad connection. You might want to make sure there isn’t a small on/off switch on the bottom of the keyboard. A few keyboards have these switches, and they can go bad, esp, if the keyboard has been dropped, etc.

Diegol,
Now that you’ve sucessfully replaced the battery and your machine is keeping good time, you might want to consider downloading a small program called TClock.exe 2.28. It is a *highly* customizable Windows clock that will allow you to synch the time with almost any time server out there. I have mine to reset the time once an hour, since I’ve noticed about four seconds of “drift” a day on my Abit NF7-S. It’ll even play a sound when it synchs the time (finally, a use for the Windows “Tada” .wav file!). Oh, it lets you set up the SysTray clock with highly visible numbers, and can display your choice of day, date, month, etc. Many sites have it available for download, including Tucows. TClock is a very cool free program. Get the 2.28 version, not the “lite” version…

Apparently, Zone Labs will send out notices to its customers who already own ZAP within two weeks. It’s possible to download the new version and just do an upgrade; that worked fine for me.

Thank you both for mentioning the Bookmark Backup extension… What a find!

Thanks, John, for reiterating what Brian Livingston said. I’d just read Brian’s email that suggested removing Firefox 1.05 before installing 1.06, and saved myself a few potential headaches. Version 1.06 seems to be running smoothly. BTW, what is this Bookmark Backup extension that you mentioned? I can’t find it listed in the list of extensions on the Firefox site. Is it a Mozilla extension that happens to work in Firefox, or does it go by another name?

Try this Steve Gibson program http://www.grc.com/stm/shootthemessenger.htm%5B/url%5D

Hi,
Sorry to hear of your difficulties with your machine. You aren’t alone in your frustration; many of my customers have dozens of viruses and worms — as well as malware — on their machines. These most definitely take the joy out of computing, but there are ways of returning your machine to a usable state. Sometimes, however, it is not possible, and a reformat becomes necessary. It’s not something that anyone particularly wants to do, but it is occasionally necessary. As jscher2000 said in the previous post, backing up your important data is essential, since it’s a very real possibility that you will lose data during the cleaning process. Bookmarks/favorites, email addresses, shortcuts to Web pages you might have on your desktop, downloaded files — these are all things that should be backed up and stored on CDs prior to trying to clean up your hard drive.

One quick point — you said that you were using both Norton Antivirus and AVG (free). Generally, it’s not a good idea to run more than one antivirus program, as using more than one at a time can cause conflicts. Try removing one or the other (remove NAV, since it’s expired), then use an online scanner, such as the scanner on the Trend Micro site. While this won’t be as comprehensive as a full heuristics scan by your own scanner, it may pick up something your scanners missed. BTW, you should probably delete any items you have in Quarantine within NAV.

Get a NEW copy of Spybot Search & Destroy 1.4 from http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html%5B/url%5D and run it. Oh, do NOT immunize your system when you first install Spybot. You want to make sure it’s cleaned out first before immunizing.

Get a copy of AdAware SE 1.06 and do a thorough scan.

If you are using Firefox as a Web browser, you will want to try a copy of CleanMOCache from http://www.buttuglysoftware.com/%5B/url%5D. This includes many options for cleaning Windows, as well as the Firefox cache.

Along the same line, download a copy of CleanUp! for Windows 4.0 from http://www.stevengould.org/software/cleanup/%5B/url%5D . This is a superb utility.

Get a copy of SpywareBlaster from http://www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html%5B/url%5D .

Get the freeware Microsoft AntiSpyware program beta — available from Microsoft.

Good luck. Let us know how you made out.

Thanks, Stuart — guess I missed, er, *skipped over* that link in his post.

Chris,
You should have no problem dual booting Win98 and XP. You must install 98 first. Once it’s installed, you can use any third party software (Partition Magic, System Commander, etc.) to resize your partition or create a new one for XP. Or, you can do it the hard way. There’s no real need to set the new partition active, since that’s taken care of by the NTLoader that XP installs when it finds another operating system present. You definitely want to create the emergency boot diskettes when your partitioning software suggests making them. Oh, XP (unlike other NT operating systems) can even be located on a second, slaved hard drive. That works well, esp. if you use something like BootMagic as a boot manager.

Ronny,
If what Leif and Viking mentioned does not work, check to see if your microphone lead is hooked up to the motherboard. You may need to plug it into the correct pin(s) on the audio header, as some system builders routinely don’t install it, figuring most people don’t use a microphone.