Windows 98 ate my wife's PC

It all started with a game^[1]. A game called "Discworld Noir"^[2].

Now, we have a PC at home which is abused by the spawn of Redmond since most games out there for the Intel platform only run if you you're willing to pay your pound of flesh to the Billibous Gateous.

Now, said game claimed that it would run on "Windows 95/98". Since the sacrificial PC runs Win95, I didn't think that this would be a problem. Thus E-J purchased said game with her hard-earned cash^[3] and took it home to play with.

So we come to install it and a wonderful message come up:

SETUP.EXE: Unresolved reference in kernel32.dll
 Failed to reference symbol GetDiskFreeSpaceExA

A little little bit of searching shows that whilst the game says "Requires Windows 95/98", they actually mean "Requires Windows 95 OSR2/98". Oh how nice of M$ to change the syscalls available between different releases of the OS without making it obivious^[5]. Hasn't the spawn from Redmond heard about having a decent ABI^[6] ?

Anyway, playing with a copy of Win95 OSR2 showed that I'd have to zap the contents of the machine's disk away to get it onto it^[8]. If I was going to do that I decided to just put Win98 on the box and be done with it - especially given the comments about the games stability (or lack of) on Win95 OSR2.

The above just shows that the game developers are luser programmers as I've found various comments that this API problem is possible to get around. There is a function to find the free space on a machine under the standard Win95 (also available under Win98 & later releases of Win95), but it only handles disks upto 2Gb in size. The new function handles disk sizes over 2Gb. Why M$ didn't think ahead and make an API which could handle this I don't know^[11].

Actually, having seen PHB work in the company I'm a BPFH for, I guess what actually happened was something like this:

Marketting:	So, what is supported by this ?
Developers:	Windows 98 and Windows 95 OSR2
Marketting:	OSR2 ?
Developers:	Yes, it is a release of an updated Windows 95 which OEMs placed pre-installed. Most PCs should be running it.
Marketting:	So we can just say Windows 98 and Windows 95 then ?
Developers:	No, vanillia 95 will not run this game
Marketting:	Never mind that - as you said most PCs should be running it. We'll just put "Supports Windows 98/95" on the box.
Developers:	What about the people who have the vanillia Windows 95 ?
Marketting:	They can just upgrade to Windows 95 OSR2
Developers:	You can't upgrade to OSR2 - you have to re-install the machine
Marketting:	Oh, in that case they can upgrade to 98

The cynic in me says that someone may have shares in M$ and is using this to help increase M$'s share price. However the realist thinks that this is just down to stupidity.

I guess that the realist side of me is correct. After all, Hanlon's Razor states that "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.".

Anyway, I blew the machine away via fdisk and started to install Win98^[13]. Finally I had Win98 spreading its filth^[14] across the "innocent" (as innocent as a machine can be which is based on a PC and has always run Windows). At this point it was quite late, so I left the machine installing over night.

On entering the machine room the next day after work I could smell that strong smell of solder flux. Its that smell which says that something in the machine has let its magic smoke out.

My first thought on getting the cover half off was "Flecks of black over that CDROM drive aren't good".

On getting the cover all of the way off I found out why the machine wasn't working... the PSU had decided to fail. Now, most PSUs when they fail will do so without even a whimper. It just stops working and stays dead. This one didn't do that. This one went with a shout rather than a whimper.

I can only guess that the PSU decided that having Win98 installed on its machine was one indignaty too far and just let go.... spraying black gunk over the insides of the case. And shorting itself through the system at the same time.

Most PC components aren't designed to a PSU shorting through them for some strange reason. Initially I didn't think that much was damaged. The only visible damage was some chared power cables and the sound card letting the magic yellow fluffy in one of its capacitors out in sympathy. That and the old-style M$ natural keyboard was fried.

On deep investgation I realised that far more damage was done - I think that the PSU spiked mains through the system in a final fit of revenge at being used as a cage for the spawn of Redmond for several years.

Why do I think this ? Well for starters one of the capacitors on the sound card has gone off and I know from personal experience^[15] that it takes quite a bit for that type of capacitor to explode. Secondly the way that pretty much every part of the system, apart from the èl cheapo ethernet card, was damaged in someway. The most impressive damage was done to the SIMMs. One SIMM was burned in half, melting the SIMM socket and burning the rest of the SIMMs.

I can only guess that the PSU went south when Win98 was fully installed and the machine was re-booted. When I disected the machine I found that the main transformer in the PSU had died. The chances are that the black gunk in the machine was oil (or similar) around the coils in the transformer. When the transformer died it would've over-heated... boiling off the oil which would've hit the airflow coming in via the PSU - thus spraying it around the machine.

The part of this I'm really annoyed by is the machine killing my first generation M$ natural keyboard. The second generation one is nowhere near as nice as the first - its feel is squishier and the cursor keys are in a nasty small block which makes using vi and command history a pain^[16]. It feels like M$ took the first generation, mated with itself several times and produced a buck-toothed cousin which belongs in the Fens^[17]

Since the machine which was killed was called "organised-crime" we can now say that not only did Windows 98 eat a PC, but it also killed organised crime at the same time^[19].

Okay, so Windows 98 probably didn't cause the PSU to get its knickers in a twist. However the superstitious side of me thinks the machine was upset for some reason - being infected with Redmond again when the machines around it are running Solaris; not having any hardware given to it; etc.

And no matter what anyone says, computers are not logical.

Just ask anyone who has had to make a blood sacrifice to get a SCSI bus working.

[1]	After all, most things start somewhere
[2]	The third game of the Discworld computer game series, eagerly awaited for by E-J and Sally.
[3]	And it is most definately hard-earned - she is an animal carer for the dog section of an animal shelter. She has to deal with sick animals, possibly dangerous dogs and the general public. Out of all of those, the general public normally cause the most stress[4]
[4]	This is something which shouldn't surprise anyone on this group, especially those who have worked on a support line :)
[5]	Its fun finding out if you have OSR2 on your machine - there are actually four different versions of Win95 (original, A,B and C). There are also two different releases of Win98 as well.
[6]	ABI - Appilcation Binary Interface. If done correctly it means that code built on a previous version of the OS will work on the new and sometimes versions code code built on a newer version of the OS will work on the previous versions[7] of the OS
[7]	iff you don't use features in the OS which previous versions did not have naturally
[8]	Actually, the best way to "upgrade" a machine[9] is to re-install the operating system, cleaning off the disks along the way. That way you clear out all of the accumulated crud on the disks[10]. Note that I'll do this even when dealing with OSs like Solaris which have an upgrade option which actually works
[9]	IMHO naturally :)
[10]	This is especially true with spawn-of-Redmond machines
[11]	Actually, I do. Its called a lack of planning on their part. Looking into the depths of the Windows API is a lot like looking into a very over-grown garden with lots of brambles and thorns to catch the unwary. "You are in a maze of user structures, all returned by different functions and with a sub-set of the same information"[12].
[12]	Have a look at the different structures containing user information you can have returned - there are about six and what you can get depends on the version of Windows or NT you are running
[13]	Only after much cursing though - I had to get Win98 to recognise the CDROM in the machine
[14]	Indeed, my first comment on getting my hands on Win98 and getting it installing was "I've touched 98 - I feel so.... dirty".
[15]	When I was doing A-level physics we had to do two projects. I can't remember what my practice one was, but I can remember what my real one was. It was basically "See how much damage we could do to electrolytic capacitors before they go bang". The answer was that they took quite a bit before they decided to let their magic fluff out. AFAIR I put too much voltage across them and too much current through them. In forward and reverse bias. I found that the capacitors would slowly regain their capacitance over a period of time and that the only way to actually damage them permanently was to blow them up. This actually took quite a bit of effort and involved me putting the capacitor in reverse bias and then cranking the voltage up and leaving it there until it went bang in a rather impressive way. I'm still surprised that I got this project past my physics teacher - I got the feeling that he was interested in what happened as well :)
[16]	I've since found a Logitech keyboard which has a layout similar to the first generation M$ natural keyboard - so the new M$ one has been relegated to being another backup keyboard.
[17]	The Fens are an area of reclaimed salt marsh to the north east of Cambridge[18] where I live and is renowned for its occupants being rather standoffish with fairly predictable results
[18]	That's Cambridge in the UK BTW
[19]	Although it could be said that Windows is organised crime