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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

A friend brought over a laptop 133MHz Compaq with 92MB RAM that was given 
to him by someone because someone else 'did not like it' in their office.

He said it would not boot.  It would not boot from hard drive (got to 
that point and got stuck).  It booted from floppy disk and we put on MS 
DOS 7.1 from a Win98 boot disk.  It had been reformatted and no OS put on.
We put on some DOS utils.  Syschk worked fine.

He forgot to bring the CD-ROM drive and the ethernet dongle, so we tried 
to copy via llpro from a CD-ROM drive in a desktop computer, which kept 
hanging so we copied the files to the hard drive, and then via parallel 
cable, for an hour or two.  About 200MB of installation files.  WORD 97 
would be in addition to this.

I tried to install Win98.

cd win98
setup
Enter (to continue):

'Your program caused a divide overflow.'

Lots of little green squares with 7 in them, blue squares followed by :, 
and one case of a blue followed by a green with Q in it.

What might be causing this problem when Windows starts to check the system 
hardware and/or software?

So I booted 2-floppy BL3 which works fine even in X, and then showed him 
Abiword in BL3 on my computer and he saved the same file as .doc and .rtf 
(they both came out as rtf format - has anyone else tried to save as WORD 
.doc?) and said he would be happy with this setup.

I am going to attempt to transfer my setup via parallel port zip drive, as 
a 50MB fs.img file, to run from a DOS partition, since he has no other 
planned use for this computer besides wordprocessing.  He is used to 
moving files between WORD for PC and WORD for Mac as rtf (since the 
conversion program for WORD to WORD won't work right).

Why would linux work perfectly on a computer where Win98 crashes while 
checking the hardware?  It would not even warm reboot.  We tried numerous 
times, powering off, waiting, powering on.....  On several other computers 
Windows works okay but linux has assorted problems.

Might it be a corrupt setup.exe?  He went home, but I want to be prepared 
for the next time.

The computer we copied via also crashed with color squares when I tried to 
exit llpro, which it has never done before.  Error messages listed various 
registers.  This is the one where I tried to use pcmcia ethernet on a 
desktop in ISA-controller slot.  I can't imagine it is a related problem.

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org