Mucking with DOS

When I got back home, I went to go talk to my upstairs neighbor, Lee. He had left me a note, asking if I could help out with a computer he had brought home from work. I got his note maybe two days ago. Yesterday, I was out and about more than I anticipated, and I was out all day today.

I threw in some laundry and went upstairs to fiddle with his PC. As it turns out, it was booting up but hanging on the Windows screen (Win98). I tried booting in safe mode, then confirming things step-by-step.

I’m really not the best DOS person in the world. Over the next two hours or so, I fiddled with a wide range of things. I don’t know that you could actually call what I did tech support or troubleshooting. It was more like a slow, systematic trial and error. I mucked with the autoexec.bat file. With system.ini. With win.ini.

Finally, FINALLY, after nearly throwing in the towel two or three times prior… I’m able to get the machine to fully load windows without throwing an error. To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what I did… but it worked when I left Lee’s apartment, and that was good enough for me.

Back home, I threw my clothes in the dryer and called it a night. I think we’re talking midnight-ish by this point. I was to be up tomorrow for an 11AM flight, and decided to do all my packing tomorrow AM.

Full, long day today. Lots of helping others, which I hope will count in my favor the next time the universe decides to portion out karma.