This morning when I turned on my computer, I was greeted with the Windows 98 Blue Screen of Death or BSOD, as we like to call it around here. My computer let me log into the network, flashed my desktop, put in all my cute desktop icons, then splat: the BSOD along with a meaningless error message about a Fatal Exception somewhere. Not a good way to start the day and especially annoying because I hadn’t even used my computer yesterday.
Dealing with BSODs sometimes forces you to go back to the bad old days of DOS. They say that in Windows XP, DOS is really, really gone this time. We’ll see. In the meantime, DOS still lurks within Windows 98, so I can use a few old (really old) tricks.
Here’s what I did to fix my BSOD. Since I was getting nowhere trying to reboot Windows, I restarted in MS-DOS mode (you choose the option from the Shut Down options). There I was with nothing but C:WINDOWS on my screen. That’s called the DOS prompt. I changed to the temp folder by typing CD TEMP (CD stands for "change directory"). Then the prompt said C:WINDOWSTEMP. Then I typed DIR to list the files in the TEMP folder. There were a whole lot of them and were probably the source of my problems. So I deleted them by typing DEL *.* (DEL is the delete command and *.* means all the files).
After cleaning out my TEMP folder, I tried to restart Windows again. It was still annoyed and started in "Safe mode." I shut down yet again and restarted. Everything was fine. So you may be wondering…what happened here? When your system crashes, sometimes it gets into a bad place and leaves garbage files in the TEMP folder that cause it to continue to crash. By deleting the problem files, I got my computer out of the bad loop it was in. Restarting in Safe mode then gave Windows the opportunity to get its act back together.