Even if you have the resources to actually use some of this stuff, you're in for a bumpy ride. (Apparently, it has been reported that such a thing as sufficient hardware for such software does actually exist. For more details on where to find this, please contact your friendly local alien abductee. Just don't let them convince you that they actually HAVE seen Win95 run on a system without any problems. A quick look in our database at work could reveal that these slightly less than sane individuals are the ones who are keeping Packard Bell in business.) Every system, no matter how well optimized, will have it's little quarks and neuroses (Mine all have the strange tendency to turn their user into a believer in radical conspiracy theory.) Some of these can sit poised and waiting for months, even years, before they decide to manifest themselves like the bean burrito you ate for lunch might manifest itself during a hot date (no risk of that here). This is when things turn seriously ugly. When this happens, you have reached the edge. You are now riding the ragged edge of the cliff that leads to the dismal abyss of the hosed.
If you ever find yourself teetering on the edge of the hosed, you have several options. First of all, depending on your general position on the grand scale of technological cluefulness. Those toward the bottom end of the scale (who comprise the vast majority of those who surround the bastion of cluefulness we call Win95 support, tend to enjoy bungee jumping off the edge using static line instead of bungee cord... tied conveniently in a noose aronud their neck. One of my fellow TSRs has told me of the experience he had with one of these last week:
The user's original problem with their system was a fairly minor one, their CD-ROM drive has stopped being recognized by the system. Normally, a sensible person (a rarity in our queue) would start with a proportionately sensible troubleshooting step (in this case, yanking the CD-ROM drive out of the system and throwing it through the nearest tenth story window was suggested. If the computer was a Packard Bell, that should follow immediately behind the drive.) Considering that anyone with this much sense could most likely even fix the computer by themself, this is not a very likely situation. What this particular luser decided was that the whole thing was a Windows problem, so he promptly proceeded to uninstall Win95, calling tech support only when his system was to the point of being unbootable!
At my dad's sysadmin job, the helpdesk has a resolution code that should be standard for all tech support personnel out there: No User Training, or N.U.T. for short. In this case, however, in this particular case, a more porper resolution code would be Human Operator Systematically Expanded Damage, which very conveniently abbreviated down to the much more appropriate H.O.S.E.D.
Other times, the systems will suddenly sprout legs and jump, hard disks screaming, into this not-so-hospitable pit of misery and endless Device Manager conflicts ("Uh sir, you want to hook up HOW many modems?") This is what happens when suddenly your hard disk gets really bored with life and decides foolishly to end it all. The main problem with this is that unlike real life, when a hard disk dies, the thing can take it all with it up to that 100 exabyte bit bucket in the sky. Everyone eventually recives one really good lesson that they should be backing up their data... I got mine several years ago when \\kids (the now-upgraded 386) got a portion of the FAT messed up. Eventually, I was able to recover a good chunk of the stuff on the drive, but lost almost as much as I retrieved. Of course, I have had lusers calling with their hard drive not even being seen by their system, and calling tech support demanding that we get their data back, claiming that Win95 was responsible for their self-inflicted predicament of not backing up. Maybe one of these days I'l start backing up myself...
The Realm of the Hosed tends not to be a very nice place at this time of year (or any time of year, for that matter. The Eagles probably said it best in the song "Hotel California": You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. More often than not, the option of chuking one's system out the window (I prefer one at least ten stories off the ground) comes to one's mind, and physical harm to a perfectly hosed computer will ensue (which, in quite a few cases, is probably a relief to us tech support reps, although we may not realize it at the time.) In one respect, this quote is slightly inaccurate. There is one known way out of the Realm of the Hosed, although it certainly ain't pretty. In all but the worst situations, one can apply the old standby, FDISK. Of course, if you do this, you will be only salightly less than hosed, but what's the fun in using FDISK if it's not going to throw you right back to start (no wait, that comes later, after you reinstall Win95/NT.)
Of course, if your system isn't the one that's hosed by a user error, the whole nightmarish tale becomes quite funny (laughing is a practice commonly engaged in by techs when they have the phone muted, ostensibly to check their resources for help... especially when one has rendered their system far beyond the point of help from anything other than a stick of dynamite.) On the frontlines of the battlefield we fight on, the Realm of the Hosed is just beyond the horizon.
One recent call saw someone teetering precariously on the edge, but not quite there. When they called, their system had been rebooting itself often, then coming back up with either fatal exceptions (HINT: If you get a fatal exception 0E in Win95, it's... a GPF!) or Windows protection errors (worse than GPFs, these will ensure a system is unbootable.) We tried safe mode, with the system freezing on startup there. Finally we went to the emergency disk, tying a string around the write protect tab to make sure it didn't fall over the edge, taking the rest of the system with it. This didn't work the first time, but the second time revealed the hard disk to be error-free. We tried safe mode again, and we were able to get it to boot fine to there. Now I was seriously wondering what was going on. Next, normal mode was working again, until it rebooted itself again three times! I'm still trying to figure out how to troubleshoot a system if I can't keep it from rebooting itself long enough to actually do anything... It's times like these when my LART gets the most wear and tear (and it's not usually the lusers either...