Further Adventures with Windows 95

            A continuing saga from Bill Commons

I am still having the occasional battle with my Post Office and
Win95 and on contacting the Pipex support line I was told "Win95
and Mailit share the same file names and any mapi or winsock files
found in the Windows directory should be renamed. Unfortunately
Windows is able to recreate these files. If you continue to
experience difficulties there is an alternative shareware mail
server which can be downloaded at this site". When I downloaded it
and read the text file it said that this program contains some
bugs, well I was not having that! The final straw came when I
reinstalled Pipex and the default Point of Presence, POP, changed
from Dover, a local call, to top of the list Aberdeen! I spent a
few sleepless nights waiting on my phone bill but thank goodness I
had spotted in time.

Right I thought no more Mr Nice Guy, I will wipe Win95 completely
and start from scratch. On the control panel is an item add/remove
programs and down the list is uninstall Windows 95. I double
clicked on this and thought that's it. Huh I kept crashing and I
thought of the horror films where just when you think the monster
is dead it rises up and starts to fight. It took five attempts
before I saw the start up screen "loading MS-DOS" and when I typed
in WIN I was greeted with the Win3.1 logo screen.

I intended to go the whole way and reinstall Win3.1 as well to
give me a clean slate. I inserted disk 1 and typed A:\setup and
received the message "Unable to read drive A". I went back into
Windows and sure enough looking at File Manager there was no drive
A icon, but much worse there was no E drive, my CD, either. I
tried to enter the command that normally loads the CD-ROM drivers
but it would not have it. I had visions of buying a new computer
and all sorts of horrors. I managed to dig out an old listing of
start-up files and from these I managed to type in the path to
install the CD. After many hours I finally was back to Windows 95,
and able to use my Email.


I have a special Ultima desktop theme which I got from the Net
which allows me to use scenes from the Ultima games as wallpaper
and tiny Avatars from Pagan running around my screen when the
computer is carrying various background functions. If I put my
mouse pointer on the bottom or top taskbars an even smaller Avatar
will attempt to jump back into the main screen. I love it. Even
better it has all the speech clips from the games as WAV files, so
instead of the usual CHIME.WAV, ding and bell WAVs, I have the
Guardian saying "Well, well, well Avatar it seems you have managed
to thwart me once again" and "damn you, Avatar, damn you" or Lord
British shouting "Stand back." I have gone over the top as the
program lets me customise it and I have loaded in every sound wave
and applied it to all the applications on the desk top.

Anyway, I tried to log on to MSN and found that Windows had wiped
that and the Exchange Post-box as well. I couldn't get it back so
I had to ring the MSN helpline. A young Indian girl answered the
telephone and coached me through the set up for the two programs.
Imagine her surprise when she prompted me to delete a file, the
Guardian's voice came up very loud saying "Are you sure?". It
seems that this voice is very penetrating and comes over the phone
clearer than my voice. I quickly hit the mute button and
apologised to her and explained about my desk top. Unfortunately
my external speakers were still on and the switch for these was
out of my reach, she had to put up with the Guardian laughing and
taunting her and the above question each time I deleted anything.
She took it in good part and was giggling at the responses.
Although the files had been deleted when I removed Windows 95 the
main cause of the failure to log on was the fact that the
telephone line at the POP was down for several days.









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