When attempting to run a game, the following message appears: ‘A required DLL file, DINPUT.DLL, was not found’. I tried to find this file by using the ‘Find’ program and it came up with an empty folder. Is it possible that somehow this file has been deleted? The computer is a Pentium III running Windows 98.

DINPUT.DLL is part of DirectX, which is used for multimedia in Windows applications such as games. The first procedure you should attempt is to reinstall DirectX. Firstly, uninstall the existing version. You should be able to do this through the ‘Add/Remove Programs’ control panel. Once this is done, you will need to install the latest version (which was DirectX 9.0b at the time of writing) of DirectX. This can be done either by downloading DirectX from www.microsoft.com/directx/. Alternatively, if you don’t want to download the rather large package, you can find DirectX on the cover CD of both APC magazine and PC User magazine. If this does not fix the problem, you can try extracting a new version of this file from your original Windows 98 CD. By using the Microsoft DLL search tool (support.microsoft.com/servicedesks/fileversion/dllinfo.asp) As the DLL search will show, this file is contained in the win98win98_28.cab file on the Windows CD. To extract the file, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ’sfc’ (without the quotes) and click OK. In the System File Checker window which appears, click ‘Extract one file from installation disk’. In ‘Specify the system file you would like to restore’ type ‘C:WindowsSystemDinput.dll’. Then, click the ‘Start’ button. The ‘Extract file’ window will now appear. Next to the ‘Restore from:’ box click ‘Browse’. Insert your Windows 98 CD and browse to the location ‘Win98′ on the Windows CD. You should only need to specify the directory of the Windows files, not the actual CAB (compressed archive) file containing the specific file you want to extract. Once you have navigated to the directory click OK. In the ‘Save file in:’ box type ‘C:WindowsSystem’ (without the quotes). Click OK and the extraction process will begin.