windows registry

when going to msconfig to tidy up startup I got the following message "enviroment variables were found in the legacy files AUTOEXEC.BAT and/or CONFIG.SYS and the variables were moved to the windows registry". What does this mean and could it be the cause/result of recent crashes.Have run scandisk which reported that 9 bad clusters were found and repaired.
Also I tried to reinstall MS sidewinder precision 2 joystick but got a message saying "_ins5576 has caused an error in OLEAUT32.DLL _ins5576 will now close". I have tried restarting but to no avail.The joystick has been installed previously with out any problems.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated,in easy to undertsand language as I am still learning.

Cheers Jim

 

Your evidently running Windows ME. That "Enviroment Variables ..." message is due to the fact that autoexec.bat and/or config.sys has new limits under Windows ME. You can't set enviroments like you could in prior versions of Windows. Some install, maybe Sidewinder, has added variables to one of those two files that aren't valid under Windows ME. Or has the PC recently been upgraded to Windows ME from a prior version of Windows?

And <a href=http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q272261> here's </a>your resolution for the Sidewinder issue with Windows ME.

Let us know if that fixes it.

 

thanx Bryan will try. i have always had ME on this pc but recently seem to have had a lot of problems which i seem to have solved,this is just the latest,is the bad clusters a bad sign or just caused by progs being installed and then uninstalled

 

Bad clusters can be caused by a lot of things. They're just FAT(File Allocation Table) problems and once they've been repaired, your pretty much ok going forward. Bad sectors are a different ballgame. That means your hardrive has bad spots on it that can't be fixed. Anyway, I'd suggest that you run scandisk regularly about every week for a few weeks and see if it's a reoccuring problem. And it can't hurt to run a disk defrag but once a month should be more than enough for defraging.

BTW, also when scandisk repairs the cluster problems, you could lose data as a result of the repair. It's not all that common but it does occur. Just to be safe I'd highly suggest you backup anything you really really need in case you do lose some files.

 

Was the message about bad SECTORS or did it say something about Lost Clusters or File Fragments??
If it is the latter, this is nothing to seriously worry about. It occurs when you are in the process or creating or updating a file, and the PC hangs, or you are forced to do a ctl=alt-del.

If you look in the C:\ directory, you should see files that look like FILEnnnn.CHK. (unless you have the scandisk option set to delete these files).

 

thanx guys, all seems to be working again.
Happy New Year