I have heard about “defragmentation”, which I understands helps to keep your disk space organised. We have had our PC for nearly two years and was wondering if we should do “Defragmentation”. We use Windows 98 so is this something we should do as part of ‘house-keeping’ and does it have any adverse effects on other files on the PC. How long should defragmenting take? We have had no problems with our PC to date. It is a Intel Celeron 333, 3GB Hd, 64MB. (more…)

The other day I tried to add an internal modem to my computer. Windows 95 automatically picked the modem up when I turned on my PC, however on that occasion I did not proceed with the installation and removed the modem. A few days later I wanted to install the modem so I went through the process again but this time Windows did not detect the modem. I then selected the ‘Add New Hardware’ option via the Control Panel but this returned a message ‘Detection Manager Error: Failed to hook ring 0 code… Did not find any new devices on your system’. I made several attempts to reinstall the modem but got the same response. I tried to manually load the modem but the brand name wasn’t on the list and so I could not proceed further. When I experienced a similar problem in the past, it was fixed by reinstalling Windows. Could you advise me on any alternatives please. My PC is a 586 with an early version of Windows 95. (more…)

I have a Canon BJC-4310SP bubble jet printer which currently has a BC-20 black ink cartridge in it. It used to have a colour cartridge to print colour but whenever we now print, the message comes up “monochrome cartridge detected, select change as current job requires colour BJ cartridge”. We usually press the “Ignore” button and it prints. However, we recently bought a BCI-21 double cartridge (with a black and colour cartridge) and tried to change the settings/printer to print colour but nothing prints at all with these cartridges. Could you please advise what to do to allow the BCI-21 cartridges to print? (more…)

I hope you can help me with an annoying problem I have when shutting down Windows 98. When I choose ‘Shut Down’ from the ‘Start’ menu, all goes well until after the screen announcing that Windows is shutting down. Then, instead of the usual screen message “It is now safe to turn off your computer” the screen goes blank with a pale flashing cursor. The only thing that seems to solve the problem is pressing Control-Alt-Delete, but this of course restarts the computer. It does not happen every time Windows is shut down, but often enough to be annoying. What can I do about this? (more…)

We have a Packard Bell, Pentium 100Mhz with Windows 95. A few weeks ago our Disk Drive (A) ceased to function. We have gone to My Computer on the desktop which indicates that it is functioning properly, however when we place a disk in the drive and try to access the disk we get an error. Also, when we boot the computer we also get an error with the A: drive. How can this be fixed? (more…)