| Giving Away an Old Computer
Some Lessons Learned
I decided to give my old computer to Literacy Volunteers of America - Waterbury. The LVA helps people learn to read, write, speak and understand English and has some nice student-friendly software to assist in the process. Deleting my personal documents en masse was fairly simple. Use the shift key and the mouse to select and hit delete. Empty the recycle bin and it's done. Well, not quite.
The personal address book in MS Word, didn't want to get deleted. Icons, the delete key, the Edit menu were all unresponsive. A search of the onboard HELP index was fruitless. I was tempted to ignore the problem, but I couldn't, in good conscience, expose my Word address book to the scrutiny of strangers. What could anyone do with it? Was I being paranoid? Even a paranoiac might be right.
Then I hit on the idea of uninstalling MS Office, in which Word and its recalcitrant address book reside. Easy. Go to Start> Settings> Control Panel> Add/Remove Programs, select MS Office, click Remove. Done. Next, I reinstalled Office. Just put in the CD and follow the instructions. To my surprise and dismay, the entries in the address book were still there. Now I realized, what I should have known, that the entries to address book were on the hard drive, not the software CD. What dolt said ignorance is bliss? (Actually, I looked that up. It was Thomas Gray and he was no dolt.) Back to the drawing board.
Determined, I decided to format the hard drive. I knew formatting would wipe everything off the hard drive and then I could reinstall Windows and Office. From previous peregrinations in Windows Explorer, I remembered that right click on a drive's icon
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would bring up several options among which is FORMAT. My hard drive, was partitioned into C,D,E, and F drives. Working backwards, I quickly formatted F,E, and D, and following the prompts on the screen, ran Scan Disk on each one. Feeling smug, I now right-clicked on C: drive, selected FORMAT and was rudely told by the computer, no way, Jose. Dummy, it said, you are running on Windows and you are asking it to self destruct.
I was now ready to tell LVA, fugeddaboudit. Instead I consulted a grandniece who was a computer science major, a systems manager I know and our own Bob Greene. All were polite enough not to snicker in my face. All told me what I had already learned, that you can't do it that way. They did tell me what to do, but, in general terms, and what I needed was something like c-a-t, cat. Bob Greene did just that for me at an Open House in The Web.
So here's the real deal!
By the way, this was in Windows 95. I'm not sure about W98, but I'd be surprised if it's different. Have your Windows 95 emergency Startup disk in hand. Don't have one? Better make one, like right now, 'cause you never know when you might need one after a crash. Go to Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel and select the Startup Disk tab. Just follow the on-screen instructions.
Now that you have a Startup disk, keep it handy, and also have ready your W95 installation CD and its Certificate of Authenticity. You'll need the product key printed above the bar code. Restart your computer in MS-DOS mode. At the C prompt (It looks like "C:\WINDOWS"), put in your Startupfloppy and type "A:\"(without the quotes) and press Enter. Now type "FORMAT C: and hit ENTER. You will get a dire warning that all will be
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