Purrs that you get your mousie back soon!

(snippage)

Frankly, I doubt this is the fault of your opsys, Millenium or otherwise.
Windows doesn't suddenly decide to reboot your machine or not recognize your
mouse.  I'm not a hardware tech but it sounds to me like a problem with the
motherboard or some other internal component.  Still, I understand your
frustration and it's a wise plan to get your photos and other things off the
machine before it decides to die completely, rather than sporadically.

Computer Purrs,

Jill

<snip>

Hardware issues are likely, but it is also highly probable that you
have so much adware and spyware that the machine is highly unstable.

There are a couple of free cleaner utilities that we use: Ad-Aware and
Spybot - neither is perfect but they complement each other and will
almost always clean up the machine, though it may take several passes
with both.  <http://www.lavasoftusa.com/>, click on "Ad-Aware
Personal"; <http://www.spybot.info/en/index.html>, click on "Spybot
S&D".

T.E.D. (tdavis@gearbox.maem.umr.edu)
SPAM filter: Messages to this address *must* contain "T.E.D."
somewhere in the body or they will be automatically rejected.

Sounds to me like you might have a faulty spot in your RAM. If so,
upgrading from Millenium to 98 might not get rid of it. Though it's
still an excellent idea - I don't think Microsoft has ever released an
OS less reliable and more bug-prone than ME (and that's saying an awful
lot!).

Your son might want to see if he can find a freeware or shareware memory
diagnostic tool somewhere to check the RAM.

Dan

Make sure your system is virus free.  Run Norton Utilities System
Check to find Disk and Windows problems.  Then run Speed Disk to
defragment each drive.  (Speed Disk takes a while)

DH is a Computer Systems Engineer, and those are the first things he
does when I hose my system.

-bonbon

ME is the worst virus I've ever got!. You may have trouble getting rid of
it, as it won't let you delete it or format the hard drive if thats the hard
drive you boot from. What you need to do, and sorry if this is complicated,
is make your hard drive with Millenium on it a *slave* HD and use another
master HD to boot from. Using the master HD you can fomat your 'slave' HD
and install W98 on it. Win98 Second Edition is still the best Window
version, IMHO - whilst not perfect, its not subject to many of the more
sophisticated attackes that work against the current Windows, and if things
get bad you can always drop back into DOS.

PC purrs - or should that be hums? - coming your way.

Yowie

Wow!! i sure got a lot of helpful replies! Thanks! My son likes F-Protect,
so he ran that tonight and found no virus. I have ZoneAlarmPro and it has
not alerted me to anything. He checked the mouse and driver and then the
motherboard. A couple months ago he had the case open to clean it and
everything was ok then. He did tell me that that the OS should have been
re-installed about every year and a half. But he was too busy and forgot
about it. He said he needs to do his as well. He has been digging into DOS
and found no problems. He says I have no adware or spyware. Of course he has
mysettings for very tight security. He seems convinced that the problem is
Bill Gates and ME instability. And the long time of not re-installing. He
feels very sorry. I made a pact with him to do it regularly every New
Year's. But we are still going to put on Win 98 2nd edition. And he is going
to partition the hard drive. Yowie, he says he can completely purge the hard
drive, no problem. He did it with a friend's pc and installed 98 on it no
problem. If you want details I can have him write it all down for you. Purrs
for everyone!!

CATherine

Purrs,

For several weeks my pc has been acting up. For no reason at random times
the screen would go black and it would automatically re-boot and do
scan-disk. It kept getting more and more frequent.
SM: Have you checked for a loose power cord?

At first my son said it
is just a Bill Gates glitch. But he finally had his movie down-loads
interrupted (we are net-worked with my modem doing the work) one too many
times. So he started trouble-shooting. he couldn't figure it out.
SM: Try logging onto www.lavasoft.de (I think it is) and download Ad Aware.
And netsearch for Spybot. You may likely have a boat load of spyware. From
the IE browser, click tools, then internet options. Click "delete temp
files" and check the box. And delete cookies. You'll lose some stored
preferences for the web pages, but what the heck.

Except
moving the mouse sets it off. But it will sometimes do it when the mouse is
dis-connected.

So, he had me get some CD-RWs and then he went to format them and his pc
won't do the Ws anymore for some reason!! He is royally p*ssed! But he is
working on my pc and his doing something, I don't know what--making room or
something. But the plan is to use his pc to reach my huge picture collection
and all my data through the networking and put it on the new disks. then he
wants to purge my hard drive and finally get rid of the &*%#* Millenium OS
and then install Win 98 from the disk we bought a few years ago.
SM: I'm running win 98 Second Edition. The first edition 98 was awful.

But he says
it will all take a lot of time. He hopes it solves the problem. It better.

Right now he has taught me a few keyboard commands and they are cumbersome
and hard to remember. And I keep reaching for the mouse!
SM: I do that iwth my old DOS computer. Whcih is text only, and I keep
reaching for the mouse.

I will be glad when
he has it all going again. But it might not be until next week. So I really
won't be replying much until then. Although I did want to know keyboard
commands all these years. Little did i know I would *have* to learn at least
a few. Now I feel like Robin. I want a mousie!!

I will try to keep up with the reading al;though I have already lost a few
messages through time limits.

CATherine