h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

UO had been crashing regularly, about three or four times a day. Mostly it would give an out-of-memory error. I suspected this was due to running too much stuff at the same time. It was rapidly becoming unplayable - once I died in the middle of a guild war due to a client crash. Other programs were experiencing the same troubles, and ScanDisk and Defrag would give this error when I tried to use them (a long-standing problem that I got around by using ScanDisk in DOS and DiskKeeper Lite instead of Defrag). I decided it was time to reinstall Windows.

First I tried the gentle approach. After backing up my home directory (onto 3 CDs, 2 of which are full of music), my Homeworld saved games, and my NetHack logfile, I rebooted from the Win98 SE CD and reinstalled without uninstalling. After booting into Windows and a bit of experimentation it was clear this hadn't worked. So I took the hard line.

Booting into DOS with a boot floppy, I found deltree.exe and copied it to the RAM disc. Then I went back to C:\ and typed these four brutal words:

C:\>deltree windows
C:\>deltree progra~1

This took a surprisingly long time - about three hours, especially the second part. (progra~1 is DOS-speak for "Program Files", if you didn't know). With this all traces of Windows and my applications disappeared.

Now, having the Win98 CD still in the drive, I ran setup from there. An hour later, having installed all my drivers again, I had a working Windoze system!

Since those errors had apparently been caused by lack of memory, I went out and bought a half-gig DIMM, thus tripling my RAM from 256 MB to 768 MB. Unfortunately, this pitiful excuse for an OS has a nasty, unfixed bug in it: some system cache goes bezerk in a machine with more than 256 MB and eats all memory. So with the extra memory aLlocated to something that didn't really need it, I couldn't run so much as a DOS box. Even that came up with an out-of-memory error. Even on a machine with 768 MB RAM, a freshly installed copy of Win98 and nothing running except Explorer and Systray

I didn't know the reason at the time, though, so I logged onto my dad's machine to look for a way around this artificial limit. A friend on MSN Messenger () said Win98 can't cope with more than 256 MB. After searching the Web a bit, I came across a page showing exactly my problem. So it seems there is a way around it: tweak an obscure setting in system.ini. Until I find that page again, I have removed the new DIMM and have 256 MB again, which is fine as long as I don't try too much.

(The title is part of a song called "Reinstalling Windows", to the tune of "When I'm Cleaning Windows" by George Formby. See http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~ivor/winsong.html)

In other news, I dropped into an agency on Wednesday and immediately got a job as a postman in the local area. I was going to start on Tuesday rather than Monday since my brace has broken for the second time, and it gets repaired on Monday. I'm now doing my first day tomorrow morning... starting at 6am

Yarg! Get yerself a copy of Windoze XP (by whatever means possible ) which is built on top of NT, not DOS. Or better still, restrict yourself to a proper OS (I know you know how...) - I still have XP lying around on this system, but it's been at least six months (maybe quite a bit more) since I last booted into it.

A postie eh? Wow! Sounds fascinating! Could you please deliver my Halifax Cashcard safely? I've had two cards registered lost and haven't had a cashcard in the three weeks it's been since I had my wallet nicked...

WinXP? Not a chance. Haven't you read about the "All your base are belong to us" clause in their EULA? I find that completely unacceptable, and I won't support a company that so obviously cares so little about their customers' privacy. (By the way, I read that there are still things in WinXP that you can only do on the command line.)

Only problem with being a postie (apart form the horrible hours) is getting to the sorting office without a bike. Well, I have one, but it's in urgent need of servicing. For one thing, its brakes are twisted, making it unridable. I presume they provide one of their standard bikes to do the job on (a three-speed, I think).

Hmm... can I ride all the way up the A34 to deliver one letter? I read about your mugging Any progress with the police yet? Cripes, but I couldn't imagine shopping without a cashcard. Oh, except that I've never used cheques.

My new card arrived the other day... still a Solo... aparently you need an income for a Switch card... any idea why? Or what the difference is?

P.S. The N in "noctua" should be lower case...

Oh, something else you might find amusing. Microsoft won "Best Linux Advocacy" in the 2003 Linux Format awards. This is why.

Oh I don't accept owt from Microsoft's EULA! Plus I'm behind a well firewalled router, so NO CHANCE they'd be able to steal owt from me. I'm still a Linux man though, and haven't XPed in months, as said.

Um, I have a credit card, so I've had to use that for shopping for the last three weeks. And Switch, Halifax will give you one if you're a student, assuming you don't open a student account with anyone else. Not that I'll recommend Halifax to anyone now, after the way they've messed me around - and to think I used to say they had such great customer service.

Hmm, you're right about the "n" in noctua, but I'm not exactly obeying strict capitalisation rules in my name as it is...

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