I have a Pentium 133Mhz with Windows 95 that I have bought in 1995 (IBM Aptiva). At first the modem went and didn’t work, then the soundcard wasn’t working. One error message I get is ‘Windat: Corrupt file - cannot open’ and the other message is ‘Mixer: Mixer Device configuration problem. The mixer functions are disabled. Now it doesn’t work at all! I used the Product Recovery CD-ROM but the message comes up ‘Windows 95 Setup: This program is not correctly configured. Please contact your dealer. The program will now close’. Any suggestions?

I’ve done some homework and found that WinDAT is an ‘OLE Digital Audio Editor’ application. That obviously doesn’t help us a great deal but at least we can now assume that the error message relates to an application involving your soundcard. I would say that the first error message you received is also connected to your second error message. WinDAT won’t start due to a corrupt file and Mixer won’t work because a corrupt file has caused a misconfiguration. Generally the easy way to fix problems like corrupt files is to reinstall the soundcard applications. The first step is to uninstall the files which can be done one of two ways. Firstly, check the program group for your soundcard on the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Programs’ to check whether it has its own uninstall routine. If it doesn’t have a shortcut such as ‘Uninstall Soundcard Applications’ (or alike), go to ‘Start’ menu > ‘Settings’ > ‘Control Panel’ and open the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ control panel. Click the ‘Install/Uninstall’ tab and scroll down the list until you find your soundcards software. This may be separately identified on the list ( eg. WinDAT, Mixer, etc…) or the software may be grouped under one selection (eg. Soundcard Applications). Once you have found the software, select it and click on to the ‘Add/Remove’ button. Once the software is uninstalled, you can reinstall it by following the procedure you originally used to install your soundcards applications. If you still have problems after this, please feel free to contact me again.