I recently purchased WindowsMe Promotional Step-Up. The Promotional Step-Up version allows for installation of Windows ME on a clean hard disk, however, the instruction manual states that “you must have a full product disk from a prior version of Windows”….”The full product CDs of Microsoft Windows 98 or Windows 95 or the floppy disks for Windows for Workgroups work for verifying a full version of an earlier Windows product”. I have attempted to contact Microsoft as I cannot install WindowsMe on a clean hard drive. It appears my only way of installing Windows ME on a clean drive is to install Windows 98 using Windows 3.1 as a full qualifying product and then install WindowsMe on top of Windows 98. Do you have any other suggestions for installing Windows ME? (more…)

I use a work laptop to access the Internet from home but use and pay for my own ISP and calls. I allowed another member of the household to use the laptop (Compaq Armada E500) and now I notice in the History column in Internet Explorer that they have been visiting some inappropriate internet sites. I need to exchange the laptop soon for another at work. Will the next recipient of my current machine be able to see what sites have been accessed while it was in my possession, or is it possible to delete that record? I use Windows 95. (more…)

I have a Pentium III running Windows98 SE and I use Internet Explorer. When I try to log on to the internet through Internet Explorer I get a ‘no dial tone’, ‘busy signal’, or ‘incorrect password’ message. Nothing I do including a restart will fix it. However, if I connect through Outlook first, close it, and try Internet Explorer it usually works fine. Occasionally, even when connecting through Outlook, I get these messages and have to hard boot the machine to get it to work. Even more strangely I have tried to remove ‘RealPlayer’ from loading at startup but after this I cannot log onto the internet, even through Outlook. If I put RealPlayer back into the startup everything works again. What could be happening here? (more…)

I have a Pentium II MMX 350Mhz 64Mb RAM running Windows 98SE with all the MS updates. Bios is an Award Bios v4.51pg. I get the following message during boot up: ‘Award Plug and Play BIOS Extension v1.0A copyright 1998 ‘ The last line in <> is a new message which only has appeared recently. What does it mean and do I need to do anything about it? (more…)

I have a problem running ScanDisk. The quick scan works ok, but when I try to do the full scan it keeps starting over and over but never gets further than just one blue marker in the progress scale. What could be causing this and is there a way of fixing the problem so I can carry out a full scan? (more…)