PC FAQs & Answers

By Steve Robinson

For suggestion or comments contact Steve Robinson via E-Mail

Letters

The Crossroads newsletter and Web sight is distributed and read widely due Cy Martin's tremendous efforts and loyalty to this publication. Consequently, I frequently receive Email from distant employees with computer problems. Here is one I received recently.

Steve,
I work in the Locomotive department in North Platte, NE and just recently saw a new copy of the U.P. CROSSROADS Safety newsletter with your column "PC FAQ's & ANSWERS.

I was wondering if you could assist a new Windows 95 user with a problem. When I exit to DOS out of Windows 95, my CD rom no longer works, along with sound card, etc. What do I have to do to keep all of the extras working when I go to DOS?

The columns that I read had a lot of helpful hints and ideas in it. Keep up the good work.

Danny-Joe, this particular problem is quite common with Win95 and Win98. In a nutshell you're going to have to install the DOS drivers for your CD rom and sound card that came with the original installation disks. Hopefully, you still have them.

If you do go to Start|Shut Down|Restart the Computer in MS DOS mode while you are in Win95. When you are in DOS install the drivers for your CD rom and sound card. This will modify your CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT startup files.

After this has been successfully taken care of edit AUTOEXEC.BAT and put a REM in at the beginning of the line that has the statement loading in the CD Rom driver MSCDEX.EXE. ( Adding a REM changes a command to a remark ) This will more than likely be the first or last line and will look something like this after you modify it:

Then edit your DOSSTART.BAT ( it is located in the C:\WINDOWS sub-directory ) file to read exactly like the AUTOEXEC.BAT MSCDEX.EXE statement before you put the REM preceding it.

Whenever you restart to MSDOS it loads the CONFIG.SYS file then the AUTOEXEC.BAT file and finally any special DOS drivers that may be in the DOSSART.BAT file.

It is done like this because when Win95 starts up it also loads the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files but not the DOSSTART.BAT file. The MSCDEX.EXE CD Rom driver is not needed with Win95 and causes incompatability problems if it is loaded.

If you do not have the sound card installation disk try adding this statement to your AUTOEXEC.BAT file:


This configures the sound board to address 220, interupt #5 and DMA #1. I Hope this helps.

Steve is a second trick car inspector at the Crest Yard at Fort Worth.

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