StartUp Files You Should Know

Start-Up Files You Should Know
Take a look at the Start-Up sequence for Windows9X.

Learn these files and what they do. Do some more research on them. Check out other sites. Look for them in your resource manuals.

SYSTEM.DAT and USER.DAT make up the Registry. You should learn how to back up and restore these files, and how to make minor changes using the Registry Editor. This was covered in earlier NewsLetters but can now be found under Care & Maintenance.

MSDOS.SYS, CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, SYSTEM.INI, WIN.INI, and the STARTUP Group are all files that load some sort of device, utility, program, TSR, or other resource. By doing a step by step boot-up through the Start Menu, you can bypass some of these files, which may tell you which one is causing the problem. From there, you can manipulate the individual file to find the exact problem.

Files like IO.SYS, DRVSPACE.BIN, VMM32.VXD, IFSHLP.SYS, HIMEM.SYS, KERNAL32.DLL, GDI.EXE, GDI32.EXE, USER.EXE and USER32.DLL are all required for Windows to run, and if there are problems when these files load, they must be replaced from the original installation disk.

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