I offered to help a friend of mine upgrade his PC, so after the latest computer fair we gutted his 486 and installed a new mother board (gigabyte GA-5AA), AMD K6-2/400 CPU plus fan, 64MB PC100 RAM, 4.3 GB Seagate HDD (model ST34311a) and an 8MB video card. The HDD fdisked and formatted ok. Went to install windows using a startup disk with CD-ROM support and Microsoft Windows is installing with less that a minute to go and then it crashes big time. Errors and faults in something called VXD etc… I did manage to get a clean install on the 5th go (played around in the BIOS), delivered it to him after playing around on it and seeing that it was stable but then it crashes at his place! His PC will now run in safe mode but when you click on the ‘Start’ button, there is a fault in ‘explorer.exe’. Please can you offer some advice? I have the same system, but with a 4MB card and a Quantum 6 GB HDD. I have had no problems.

This sounds like a Virtual Device Drive (VXD) issue. This is probably caused by a conflict but you have not mentioned which VXD threw the exception so it is hard to narrow down the problem since we don’t have a place to start. Other causes of this problem could be faulty hardware, or if you are trying to install Windows NT, this could be a problem since Windows 98 SE can cope with VXD drivers much better. It may also be a problem with the partition size into which you are trying to install Windows or it could be a virus on your HDD which may not necessarily be eradicated by formatting your computer. To make more progress with the problem, please send me the following information: What operating system are you trying to install; HDD type and formatted configuration (ie. partitions, IDE? SCSI?); HDD format (eg. NTFS, FAT32, etc…); and what VXD(s) are throwing the exceptions (errors). If you could email, fax, or post the answers to these questions to me it would be a great help.