My Dad's company has some old laptops that they are giving the salesmen. These things are pretty old. I think they have 64mb ram and 300-400mhz processors with 5gb hardrives. Because of the low ram, they loaded Windows 98 on them. I suggested Windows 2000 Pro, but whatever.

Two of them are having problems though. They don't want to spend money for new ones, and certain software is registered to those machines. Plus, they want them all to have the same laptop for troubleshooting.

He brought one home today to try and fix. I am not good with old systems and haven't touched Win98 in years. The "errors" are very minor. It is just a simple notification of some missing files on startup. Seems like a driver or registry issue maybe. From what I could tell, it functions fine. Might as well fix them though. Here are the exact errors:

After Win98 screen, black screen saying:

vredir.vxd is missing or something, press any key. Then, it comes up again with dfs.vxd

After continuing to the desktop, a window pops up before it loads. It says:

dynamic link or library is missing
msnp32.dll
Some error with Windows network below it

Any ideas on how to get rid of these or what is causing them. I appreciate any help. Lol, I guess I can give you a gmail account or something for helping.

andrescasta

Sorry you have to deal with Windows 9x...

I've had that problem before and fixed it by uninstalling all network adapters in Device Manager, rebooting, and reinstalling the devices. If you continue to have problems after you do that I would try removing Client for Microsoft Networks in network protocols then reinstalling it.

I had a similar problem with missing drivers on a w98se machine and it seems that there is a "master driver file" on the w98 system that is unique to every machine. Sometimes the file can be rebuilt as per the instructions above, sometimes not. This master file is never the same on any machine, so you can't simply copy it from another machine, in fact the file will be different on each install of the operating system on each machine. Just another MS way of doing things.
The problem got resolved at a techie forum at a site that was run by an extremely knowledgable collection of individuals. Their site specializes in these sort of things. You might want to check with them if the above suggestion fails to work, or if nobody comes along with a better idea. You may have to register there to be able to post your question.

Why dont you just format the pc and reinstall the O.S. It will run much faster than the operating system it has now, and you would instantly get rid of any junk it may have (not to mention spyware or viruses that couldve been the main cause of that malfunction.)

It's not a big problem, I recommend that you try this:

- Reinstall Windows 98

OR

- Write down all of the missing files on a piece of paper and find them on your Windows 98 CD, then, simply copy them to your "c:\windows\system" directory (some may need to be copied only to the "c:\windows" directory, try it if Windows still can't find the file).

Windows 98 has the tendency to configure something without actually copying the needed files to it's sytem directory, thus creating all sorts of errors (and headaches)...

Worked for me when I had Windows 98.
Good luck!

personally i wouldnt mess about with it , just reformat and install win98.