I have a 486/DX 100 and am using Windows 98. When I am on the net (it doesn’t matter how long, it could be 5 minutes or 5 hours) and a page is loading, sometimes I get this message in a box that appears. It has Explorer on the top of box and says: This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, please contact the program vendor. Why does it do this? I really get annoyed. It also happens with this Screen Saver that I downloaded from the net. Please help., (more…)

Hi I’m having big problems when I’m on the internet 1 out of 2 times I’m in the net, a Netscape message will appear in a box stating: This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, contact the program vendor. Netscape caused an invalid page fault in the module Netscape.exe. When this message appears on the screen I have to close Netscape and reload it again. What does this mean and how can I repair this inconvenient problem? (more…)

I am P133 PC running Windows 95b. This printer is called a GDI printer…what does that mean? If I attach the printer and turn it on, the PC will not power on. If I turn off the printer, and then turn on the PC, it works. I can then turn the printer on and start the installation using the latest Panasonic drivers from the Panasonic web site, but just before the installation of the printer driver completes, the machine hard hangs, with no mouse cursor movement and numlock light locked on. I have to use the reset button on the computer to restart the machine. When the machine reboots, Windows tells me it has found new hardware and is installing the software for it. It starts the driver installation again and of course just ends up hanging again. I tried starting windows in “Safe Mode” and installing the driver which worked, but when I go to reboot, windows still finds the printer as new hardware and starts installing the driver again which leads to the computer hanging. If I “cancel” the new hardware wizard, the machine hangs just after putting up the desktop icons. I’ve physically removed the AWE sound card and 3C509 network card so that all that remains in the machine is the PCI video card and mainboard with associated on board IDE, floppy, and I/O controllers. Windows device manager reports no problems with the LPT1 port. I have removed the LPT1 port from the device manager list and had windows find it and reinstall it. I have tried setting the parallel port to standard bi-directional, and EPP, and ECP with no difference in the symptoms. The printer works fine when we install it on another machine, and we have successfully installed a HP5L laser printer on this machine. This machine previously had other dot matrix and bubble jet printers attached to it with no problems. Have I just wasted over $400.00 on a laser printer that won’t work? (more…)

Recently I took my computer (P11-266) to the original supplier in for a zip drive to be installed. They experienced problems and decided that Windows 95 needed to be reloaded along with all other software and reformatted the disk. The hard drive light is now permanently on and the technician says he has experienced the problem a few times before but does not know what causes it but its not a problem. Is it and what is the cause? Also scandisk (standard option selected) takes a long time to run as it repeatedly restarts - the message is: Scandisk has restarted 10 times because windows or another program has been writing to the drive. Quitting some programs may enable Scandisk to finish sooner. The message repeats regularly eg 5 times in 35 minutes and the scan continues. Only Windows is running at the time. I believe the standard scan should take only a minute or two. What is wrong? (more…)

I installed Windows 98 and am having problems since then. The computer seems to be slower and Word 97 does not function properly. The sound recorder does not work any more, so I cannot send any voice mail. Now I want to install Windows 95 back and would like to ask you if Windows 95 can overwrite Windows 98 without any damage to other files (eg. doc files)? (more…)