Guy Pelchat said:
I have both windup and Win98 on my hardrive and since I no
longer use 98 I would like to remove it. Thanks
(Don't read this if you have any Office, Outlook or whatever
leftovers to preserve from your Win98 days. This isn't the official
Microsoft way to go about doing this. If there's a one-click wizard
that'll remove 98 while preserving address books and whatnot, I
don't know about it.)
Edit the file boot.ini (on your boot partition, uhm, C:\), Notepad
will do if you don't have a Real Text Editor: right-click boot.ini,
open with..., pick Notepad (which is for some reason confusingly
listed as "Editor" on my computer), remove the line under
[operating systems] that is responsible for putting Win98 in your
boot menu. Save.
Now you'll no longer be prompted to choose between 98 and XP on
boot, but Win98 is still there.
Delete the file win386.swp. It's no longer needed.
You may want to delete autoexec.bat, io.sys, msdos.sys and
config.sys while you're at it since they're leftovers from when
Windows was more or less a graphical user interface grafted onto
MS-DOS, but I suggest you hold yourself back there in case you
don't know what you're doing. They exist on _my_ XP installation (I
never had any other Windows version on this HD) -- as zero byte
files, and I wouldn't hesistate to delete them... but then, I'm
like that.
Now for removing the part of Windows 98 that actually takes up hard
disk space.
Windows 98 saves quite some user data in its Windows directory (IE
"favorites", for example, and if I recall correctly) so if you want
to keep any of that, do that now (or rummage through the recycle
bin later).
Then delete Win98's Windows folder while booted into XP. Just make
sure it's your Winodws 98 Windows folder as opposed to
(uhm...windup?) XP's -- not that XP would ordinarily let you delete
_that_ one.
Win98 programs in "Program Files" might still be in working
condition afterwards (albeit "dormant" in that no Win 98 programs
will auto-start, have entries in the registry, or be sneaking about
in other ways), so maybe you might want to wait with deleting them,
depends.
I also suggest converting your harddrive to the NTFS filesystem.
The FAT32 filesystem used by Windows 98 does not support access
permissions, for example. (If you're online a lot it's a good idea
to log on as a user with limited rights (a non-administrator
account) so intruders or malevolent software will have a harder
time messing with your system. Similarly, if you share your
computer with others you might not want everyone to peek into your
personal files or tweak system-level settings and instead use "All
Users" documents folder to access/share common files.)
But FAT32-to-NTFS conversion is a different topic altogether. I
just found a website that might help you with that:
http://aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.htm
good luck...
~Ally
