General Chat

hi all, my son has been given his grandads old computer. its an ibm, and not too bad, but we have no start up disc. it has got bits of this and that scattered about all over in it. is there any way of getting rid of all of this, as you can tell by my message so far i know lots about computers [lol]. have had scary quotes from a couple of places ! just want to spring clean, and start again. help. anyone out there got a start up disc they dont need ? sue [ a techna phobe]

hi william, have just had a look on there, couldnt see what i needed, will go and have another look. many thanks, sue.

Sue What operating system is it on? (Windows 98, XP etc)

hi bob. now it gets confusing.it was windows 98 but howard [granddad] put in windows 2000. but i have no discs or paperwork for the computer, i think he threw it all away when he had his new one built. he gave my son it so he can play on age of empires 24/7 ! but the computer struggles along, crashes constantly ETC. howard removed a lot of his things from it, but odds and ends are lurking . its running like an old banger, badly in need of a service ! lol. sue.ps its c 5 yrs old. is an ibm/ aptiva / amd-k6 [tm] 3d processor. /with 97.776 kb ram. if that helps.

Sue I am afraid that this comp is not up to playing a memory hungry game like AOE Without discs you are best to just search around and delete anything you find that isn't wanted bit by bit. If you are not sure then just change the name (filename.exe to filename.sue) or something like that. Only do one at a time to see if anything stops working. You can fid out what any file does by googling it too. That's another way of finding unwanted stuff. The bad news though is that, even fully clean, it isn't up to the job. It will word process happily and would probably run GR if you tried.

hi bob, it actually plays aoe quite well. has aoe 1 and aoe 2 installed. main problem it has is stopping playing, the thing will not close down afterwards, the program will not end. we did add a graphics card, and away it went. like i keep telling the hubby, the oldies are sometimes the goodies [oh- i mean him not me, lil ] sue.

Oh! well.... I know nothing about W2000. There must be a way of removing unwanted programs though so go through that and remove everything you don't need. Then go through the program folder and del all progs that you don't need. This will still leave odd files about but they should do no harm. There are programs like "RegCleaner" that will clean up the registry but be sure to back it up first. Good luck Bob

hi bob. that sounds promising- have tried to delete what i can. but such a lot on there that i do not recognise. will try that many thanks. sue.