by Ron Enderland

Everybody who's ever spent more than a month running a computer has crashed it at least once. Especially if they run Windows.

It's been about a year since my last MAJOR crash. It was my fault, to be sure. I had learned this really neat thing about file manager. I had discovered that you could "drag and drop" from file manager into program groups. "Wow!" I thought. "This is cool!" Well, computer users, if you choose to do this, let me give you a little free advice: STAY OUT OF WINDOWS\SYSTEM DIRECTORY!

You see, I found, in my aimless ramblings, a veritable plethora (plethora (N.): A small parasitic flatworm.) of executable files in the System directory. These include files with innocent enough names like KRNL286, KRNL386, WSWAP, and USER. There were also files with rather sinister monikers, specifically GDI and DOSX.

I happily dragged these files and dropped them into a group that I had cleverly named "Testing Ground." I had been dropping files there all evening, trying them out and moving the ones that I liked to groups that were appropriate for them. As a matter of fact, In this manner I had found several nice little Windows utilities that I didn't know that I had. I was feeling pretty clever, indeed.

After rounding up all of the EXE extensions in System, I switched out of file manager and looked over my haul. The only file that made a real icon was SYSEDIT. All the rest made these ugly little default icons that DOS applications produce. Now, that should have been an omen, right?

I ran SYSEDIT. It was a neat little text editor that automatically brought up two INI files as well as AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS. I shut it down and dropped it into my Utilities group.

With confidence brimming, I ran KRNL286. Nothing happened. Well, let's try KRNL386. Nada. Okay, WIN386 has something to do with the Windows system using virtual memory. I don't want to run that, because I don't want to do something STUPID, now do I? So, I run USER. Once again, nothing happens. The only things left are the files with the foreboding names. Well, nothing has happened so far, so I'll just run this little file called DOSX.

I'm not real certain what happened next. I know that Windows instantly ceased functioning. I seem to remember some sort of briefly flashed error message that said, to the best of my recollection, "Serious Hard Disk Error!" Well, I've had crashes before. I just rebooted. Except that, this time, the computer would not restart.

Well, I didn't panic. I had a rescue disk all ready for such an incident. I popped it into A drive and rebooted again. I fired up my directory utility to read the damage. It wasn't pretty.

Some of my root directory files were okay. More were missing. A large percentage of the files listed, however, had strange sizes. CONFIX.SYS, for instance, a PC magazine utility, showed a size of 1 1/2 megabytes. This file was ordinarily less than 2 K in size. Obviously, I had serious problems.

I ended up reinstalling DOS. Once the computer would boot on its own, I was able to attempt to run everything on the hard drive. Total damage: A loss of about a third of my hard drive contents. Norton Disk Doctor put in some serious overtime putting my shredded files back together. When it finished, it headed straight for the golf course.

So, what did I learn? Well, be careful with File Manager. Try not to run DOS executables out of Windows if at all possible. If a crash occurs, don't panic. Calmly use your wits to get your system back on track.

If, like me, you sometimes get in the mood to do something stupid, then may I suggest organizing a neighborhood contest of who can drive their car the farthest after draining all the oil from the engine. Maybe walk barefoot across a Texas yard full of sand burrs. Or perhaps leave your life savings overnight on a New York City park bench in a paper bag, just to renew your faith in your fellowman's honesty. But for heaven's sake, STAY OUT OF WINDOWS\SYSTEM!