Re: Installation of XyWin; REinstall

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

What does "Just start Win9x in the Protected Mode" mean? All 32-bit OSes
are running in protected mode (that is, all RAM is available to the OS,
as opposed to DOS mode, where only the lower 640 K is available). From
what follows, I assume you mean Safe Mode, in which no special drivers
are loaded. That might well work, since VGA drivers in 32-bit Windows
tend to load in areas that were free under DOS (and Win 3.1), and that, I
suspect, the XyWin installation routine (illegally) uses. But I still
say the best M.O. is to make a clean installation on a DOS machine
(quick, while one can still find one), and copy it to a CD or ZIP disk,
to have handy for each "upgrade."
	As for moving or reinstalling Windows, preserving all your
customizations is just what Micro$oft DOESN'T want you to do, because Big
Brother Bill knows what's best for you, and you shouldn't really have
done anything but the defaults. But aside from wanting to spite BBB, I
think it's a good idea to do a complete reinstall of the OS and all one's
apps periodically. Windows morphs. That's all there is to it. Things get
skewed, bits of apps that you installed and then removed are still
lurking about, clogging the system and mucking things up. So keep your
data on a separate partition (or even a separate drive), and every two or
three years set aside a couple of weeks to format C: and reinstall
everything.
	By the way, I don't know about ME, NT, 2000, or XP, but you can backup
your registry (it's just two files, SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT) in Win 95,
and Win 98 does it automatically every time you boot; look in
c:\windows\sysbckup; all those files called rbNNN.cab are your most
recent registries, along with your WIN.INI and SYSTEM.INI files, all
compacted (there's someplace where you can set how many backups it keeps;
default is five). Search the Help files for Scanreg to see how to make
additional backups and restore from them.
Patricia