It all started with a new motherboard. I upgraded to a new motherboard about two months ago and saw some "kinks" I knew I should rebuild the Win95 OS, but I decided to wait and do the Win98 instead.
While I was away on a business trip, the kids loaded a new game and the system started having exception errors on VMM when they would exit the program, run from cdrom. Then whenever I would send email from Netscape, and try to load a url at the same time, I would get the error... that kind of stuff.
I attempted to upgrade to Win98 a few days ago and I've been in repair-heck (watching my language here) ever since.
The upgrade failed and wouldn't run from cdrom. Copying it to my harddrive wouldn't copy all of the files.
It somehow hosed the Win95 so I tried to reinstall it.... a few times... from command prompt, copied to my hard drive.
Where I'm at now?? Either installing to a new folder, or the current one, I get the same result. When Win95 loads for the first time, it does the plug and play and appears to see the video driver that I give it, but won't accept the soundcard driver. It continues past the plug and play install and Explorer crashes. Then after that, Explorer always crashes, safe mode or not. I don't get a chance to get to the control panels. I don't know how to edit the system.ini or anything from here.
Machine specifics I don't know. I haven't taken it apart to see what I have for cdrom or anything.... I guess my first plea for help is "How do I find out what I have for hardware" the easiest way?
Sorry to sound so dumb! I just don't know Win95 (or Win98 for that matter). I'm a Unix person.