Diagnosing/Fixing Old, Dead Laptop

[Ortho]

Hi,

I've got a Toshiba laptop from 1999 that was really nice then. Anyway, it's got very little RAM, I think a 2GB hard drive, etc. It runs Windows 98.

For a couple of months, it's been taking longer and longer to boot, and yesterday it refused. It hits the Windows 98 screen and chews and chews, and it used to finally come up to the desktop and now it doesn't.

I don't know much about these things, but I did make a bootable cd-rom from bootdisks.com, and changed the bios to attempt to boot from the cd. The problem continues. So, I am assuming that the problem is not that I have bad sectors on the boot section of my hard drive, but that my registry is corrupted. I went into some utility in DOS to restore the registry and found that the most recent backup date for the registry was 6 months ago. I tried to restore that, but it just went into its chewing thing and never came out.

So, is there any hope for me here? I have no means of reinstalling windows 98--whatever disks they gave me with the computer disappeared 15 apartments ago.

Because I have access to DOS, I have no problem getting files off the machine. I just use it for a couple of gambling things and my wife plays games on it while we're watching television.

-Is it possible for me to salvage this installation of windows 98? I have a crypto casino or two installed on there and their activation thing is notoriously dodgy, so if I can't save this particular install I'll just switch that over to a new machine and anything goes with the old one.

-If it's not possible, is this a reasonable spot to think about fooling around with an alternative OS? I don't know much unix, but I was thinking maybe linux or i've got in my head that there might be an open-source windows alternative.

Anyway, I'd really like to fix what I think is the corrupt registry problem, so if anyone can give me a pointer I'd appreciate it.

[CORed]

Registry corruption is certainly a possibility, but it's also possible that you have bad memory, hard dirve, or other hardware problems.

Have you tried running scandisk from DOS? If you have file system corruption (very common with the FAT file system used by Windows 98) this might fix it. If not, I'm not sure anything other than a reformat and reinstall will work. You can still buy Windoes 98 disks, for undr $100. Google for them. Of course, if you have hardware problems of some kind, this may not work. If you know anybody that has a Windows 98 disk, you could borrow it. Because you have an OEM licence for that machine, you would not be doing anything illegal. This still may leave you with the problem of reinstalling device drivers, if you have any hardware not compatible with generic Win98 drivers. These could be hard to find for a machine that old.

You could certainly intall Linux on the machine, but Gnome and KDE, which are nice, fairly Windows-like desktops, will probably not work well on an old machine without much memory. The only Windows-compatible open source OS I know of is ReactOS, but it is still in early stages of development, and not very useful.

All things considered, it's really questionable whether a machine this old is worth much time or money to try to resurrect.

[Ortho]

Oh, yes, forgot that bit. Scandisk does a surface scan but has been unable to fix the bad sectors for a really long time, like 2 years. Defrag also doesn't work.

And thanks for the reply.

[CORed]

If the scandisk and defrag don't work, most likely your file system is hosed beyond repair, and possibly your hard drive is dying, too. It looks like you would need to reformat at a minimum, and that may not work if the hard drive is bad.

[Ortho]

Yes, that all makes sense. I've decided to just stump up for a new machine. Thanks for the help.