Power Toys to the rescue

Question: My nephew borrowed a game CD and installed it. It's designed for Windows 95 (I think it's SIMCITY but that's not important). To make a long story short, after he was finished with it, he returned the CD and deleted the directory using Explorer. However, in the Control Panel, Add/Remove Program, Install/Uninstall tab, there is still an entry for it. If you click on it to uninstall you get an error. I assume this entry on the Install/Uninstall tab is from the Registry! How do I go about removing it? Do I have to edit my registry?

-- G.S.

Answer: Editing the Windows 95 or NT registry is the hard, painful way to do it. Sort of like do-it-yourself dentistry. There is a simpler, less masochistic method you can use. Several months ago, I mentioned Power Toys, a nifty freebie provided by Microsoft. It comes in handy in this situation. Download it from www.microsoft.com and install the Tweak UI program. When installed, double click on the icon created in your Control Panel. Open it up and click on the Add/Remove tab. Pick the offending app and click "Remove." It's almost as much fun as laughing gas and never makes you swell up like a chipmunk.

Question: I own a six-month-old IPC Pentium 133 with 256K pipeline cache, 16MB RAM, 1 Gig hard drive, 2 Meg video card, 6X CD-ROM, internal 14.4 modem and running Windows 95. Ever since it was new, it crashes with invalid page faults, GPFs and segment load failures, if more than four or five windows are open, or while surfing the Net and opening new sites. If I run the system monitor with the free memory graph open, it appears the computer runs out of free memory when it crashes. The motherboard has been replaced and Windows 95 reloaded by the vendor. The RAM chips were not replaced. The problem still exists and the vendor does not have any ideas why. The computer does not do this while running games such as Duke3D. I don't have any out of the way software loaded and have approximately 600 MB free on the hard drive. Do you have and suggestions as to what the problem might be?

-- B.L.

Answer: Two of my usual experts point to two possibilities and two remote ones. "I would suspect either the memory or the cache memory," said Jeremy Schmuland at the West Edmonton CompuSmart store. "You can test the cache on most motherboards by disabling it in the CMOS setup."

CMOS, by the way, is short for complementary metal oxide semiconductor and is pronounced "sea-moss."

Despite it's weird name it isn't a component of Pacific Rim cuisine and it's a bad idea to put it in a fish tank. CMOS memory on your computer holds the date, time, and system setup parameters and can be accessed by hitting a specific key on boot up.

On some systems it's accessible via a function key (F1 through F10) when the computer starts.

"Alternately, you can try actually removing the RAM chips and seeing if the problems go away," added Schmuland.

Schmuland's CompuSmart co-hort Kirk Reid also points to the memory but suggests looking at the processor.

Ask the company that replaced your motherboard if the chip was changed at the same time. If it was it could be the culprit.

Reid also suggest : "It is remotely possible that the problem is with one of the software drivers, but I don't consider this to be likely. "

Probably the best place to start though is by testing the system with software packages such as Norton Utilities or Checkit. These tools check hardware and software integrity.

Question: Do you know any source of information on the Wang computer company? Does it still exist? What's the history of the company? Thank you for any information you can supply.

-- Clay

Answer: Information on Wang Laboratories Inc. can be found at www.wang.com.

The Lowell, Mass.-based company was a computer industry pioneer. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 1992.

The once mighty company was a computer industry giant in the 1980s and was a leader in office word-processing systems. The arrival of multi-purpose IBM PCs destroyed its market for proprietary machines. It emerged the summer of 1993 as a far smaller company concentrating on software aimed at businesses. Hope that helps.

CyberWalker notes:

I asked you a few weeks ago if you'd been infected by the Hare or Krshna virus. Luckily no one e-mailed me back with an incidents. That's the good news. A reader calling himself Krash did alert me to something equally as vicious: a malicious batch file.

As you may know, a batch file is a script that runs DOS commands. Normally they are very useful. You can even write your own. But, as Krash found out, they can also be dangerous because they can contain delete and reformat commands. "I got a batch file off of the alt.binary.pic newsgroups by accident," said Krash, "It has the potential to do some serious damage. I was downloading pics, just selecting somewhat arbitrarily. Then I found this .bat file in my download directory, and double clicked on it."

The batch fle deleted a bunch of Krash's system files. Since he was bitten, he wanted everyone to know about it.

"What I suggest is associate .bat files with 'Notepad" instead of running the program. That way it will just open it to be edited."

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