Computer help needed

[Ozzy Fudd]

In my journey today my very old neighbor asks if I know any one who fixes computers because his don't work anymore.
Well I say I fiddle around with them been doing it since 1993 I told him. great take a look........man I should have said nothing.
he has an old Gateway G-180 (don't use it on line thank god) but it shits Blue screen mania all over the place. I say you got a big problem do you have any disks with this. lucky he did, but no restore disk. a win98SE disk with no book or product key he lost it. (in a pile of shit all over the house.) I wish I had a camera cats, birds singing like walking into a zoo. any way I told him just buy a new one. can't afford one ( and he really can't ) I said I'm going to erase the drive and reinstall your windows. he gave his ok. now without no key WTF do I do. I tried the swap disk trick at reboot but it denied my 98 up grade key code. how can I fix this.:confused:

[Douglas T.]

Not sure what to do but it sure feels good helping someone don't it!?!

[Little Texan]

Is Win98 still installed on the system? If you haven't wiped the drive yet, and you can get the system to boot, just go to run, type in regedit, and navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\ProductID , and that should give you the product key. If you have wiped the drive, just google it for the answer.

http://www.webtechgeek.com/How-to-Find-a-lost-Windows-product-key.htm

[Ozzy Fudd]

Originally posted by Douglas T.
Not sure what to do but it sure feels good helping someone don't it!?!

only when ya think ya know what your doing. man what fun.

[Ozzy Fudd]

Originally posted by Little Texan
Is Win98 still installed on the system? If you haven't wiped the drive yet, and you can get the system to boot, just go to run, type in regedit, and navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\ProductID , and that should give you the product key. If you have wiped the drive, just google it for the answer.

http://www.webtechgeek.com/How-to-Fi...roduct-key.htm

Hey now that's a cool site wish i had the brain power to understand half of it.

[Ozzy Fudd]

Well here is what I wound up doing. after long bouts of just wanting to hit it with a BFH I dug through my bottom drawer in my dresser it is my ( junk I save spot ) I got all kinds of software that has been lets say been made for me. in there was win, (95 My OEM), copies of 98se,and,2000 Server with a bunch of other things so I used the copy I had. it had the product key already typed in as well..hey I'm happy at this point. I put in a faster cd rom for him went from a 6 to a 12. put some memory in it from 64, 128 edo. wow have we come a long way or what. I put in a old SB16 sound card too. had to... his stuff would not work because of me scrubbing the drive. also put in windows office 97 for him. well I played around with it works fine. I wonder how fast he will load it up wit shit. he had a 4gig hard drive. to bad I did not have a bigger drive for him. oh well he can put all his card games back on it now.

Ozzy Fudd Good Samaritan over and out.

[thome]

I have tried to rehab a couple computers and what I found out was
if you have a upgrade disk and you have wiped your hard drive it won't load you must have a valid operating system even if it is win.95 then you can upgrade to /98/XP or whatever.

Use -disk wipe- A drive (can be found off the net from another computer)or whatever depending on how old you box is, then borrow a valid win98 from a friend and then use your xp upgrade disk or whatever,

The new HP I bought this time last year has XP media edition and boot disks made by my computer at home by me., they are matched to this computer so I cannot loan it out to a friend the system disk that is.

The way Mircrosoft is fukking us is you cannot register or it will show that two computers with diff IP have the same code.When borrowing a friend system disk.

They didn't give me a XP Media disk I had to make boot disks off of what was on my hard drive.

Kinda pisses me off that I don't have a CD of XP.

I do ;I have all the disks from making Mirror Images of friends systems but my new purchase doesn't have a seperate disk .

Jaggoffs!

And a year ago Microsoft stopped handling any repair upgrade or anything that has to do with any system from 98 and back.

You must third party off the net for 98/ 95/ NT, upgrades ..etc..

Now I have confused myself again with -brain smert stuff- and I am spent.

Oh yeah part of the reason I bought this box was it was xp with a free upgrade to Vista Media, disk that was seperate and I didn't want Vista because of the NEW Software issues but I have the disk and am affraid to load it .

I realize that if I don't like it I can wipe it and get my XP back but ....

I am confused again and affraid of box......

[hankster]

Bud, don't install Vista ever, it has way too many issues with memory and peripherals, you'd have to spend more to upgrade your hardware than to upgrade to VM. Now that microsoft is coming out with Windows 7, wait a little while and upgrade to that. Microsoft is speeding up the release of that OS because of the heavy drop in Vista sales due to sluggish sales, so instead of fixing the problem with vista, they are changing the medium altogether with 7

[Kristy]

Wipe the drive. Go to a site like Seagate and see if you can download a zero fill and run that (depending upon the size of his drive it might take several hours) and then, I dunno, see if you can steal a copy of XP and reload that. Windows no longer supports 98 so it would be ridiculous to try to re-install it.

[Full Bug]

Ozzy Fudd, you should sign up here and ask them, been using this site when needed for years, and they have never steered me wrong, honest, especially one pro named 'patio' check it out.....
Computer Hope Forums

[Hardrock69]

I have copies of every Windows OS dating back to 1.0, though I have never installed any version before Windows 95 just to check the primitive OS out.

I still have my first PC....150Mhz Pentium....I think it holds a whopping 64Mb of EDO memory.

Works fine. But just have no use for it, naturally.

[Anonymous]

You can use it to run old DOS games... the way it was meant to be!

c:\>cd prince

c:\prince>prince megahit

------------------------

c:>\cd monkey

c:\monkey\monkey v i m

"Deep in the Caribbean..."

Ah, mamaries...

Cheers! :bottle:

[FORD]

If you have an old Windows 98 era PC and want to install a new OS on it (but aren't sure about Linux) look for Windows FLP online. It's a stripped down version of Windows XP designed to run on older hardware in a corporate environment, which is why it was never released to the public, but it's fairly easy to find on the net.

I installed it on a 300 mhz Celeron with 64MB ram that originally ran Win98, and it ran great. It's ideal if you just need a stripped down old box or an old laptop that you take on the road primarily for surfing the net or emailing. It even runs cleaner than if you modified a regular XP installation with nlite or XPlite or any other such tools.

This isn't recommended for gamers or media center type systems obviously...... just a way to get a little more life out of old hardware where a standard build of XP wouldn't work.

Does require a network card though. I don't think it does dial up modems at all (if anyone still uses those things)