A minor Windows 98 problem.

[rc777]

Er... this isn't exactly a CD-burning related question, but I just thought that I won't be violating any rules because the header of this forum is 'General S/W...'. So anyway, I'm just irritated by Windows 98 (same as Windows ME) when the screen (wallpaper) disappears for a while (leaving its place black) when the icons first appear on the desktop during bootup. Then after a while the wallpaper comes back when the system nears finishing reading the hard disk. It's not a problem, but it sucks. Anybody know how to fix this? During some installations, it shows up, and during others, it doesn't.

[Matt]

Do you have active desktop on? I find that screws up background stuff quite often.

[rc777]

I dunno. I just installed Windows ME. I installed ME again this morning because it went totally nuts last night, it would hang up even in safe mode (installed ME yesterday, and that's when the blanking wallpaper occurred), and the problem was no longer there. This happens with Win98 as well. I hope WinXP is a lot better, but I wanna run XP when I already have something like a Clawhammer at 2.xGHz.

[Gohlee]

My (Duron 700) machine came with ME (aka Win98, 3rd edition), and I liked it alright (wasn't *that* bad), but got so sick and tired of the lockups, and reboots that rather than wait for a new machine with WinXP, I got the upgrade. BOY!, *HUGE* difference! WinME has System restore, which I used occasionally, but it seemed to take forever; WinXP does it superquick. Even though the upgrade left my file system as FAT32, I still see a MASSIVE improvement in stability. Plus there are enough little things which are handy or just plain neat that made the upgrade worthwhile. Unless you're fairly close to getting a new machine, I wouldn't wait...unless you like to read during those numerous times your machines booting up.

[dodecahedron]

Gohlee, you can (if you want) convert your file system from FAT32 to NTFS (without having to reinstall or anything).

[Gohlee]

I've heard/read this, but I'm not sure...
--I'm already getting very good stability, and loading speed, would going to NTFS improve that?

--Would having XP on NTFS be any better/worse for program and hardware compatibility?

I have a, "if it's not broken, don't fix it" attitude right now, but if there's enough reason to switch, why not?

[ChrisX]

The problem is very simple to fix and why are doing a lot of work and wasting your time, all you have to do is to untick "view as a web page" in desktop settings. You don't have to upgrade the OS to Win XP.

You right click with your mouse on your desktop, then select active desktop and untick "view as a web page". This should eliminate the blackness on start up with your desktop view.

Is this as simple as that? I have two computers, Win98 and WinMe, the desktop settings are set this way, unticked.

I have another, a Windows 2000 computer, this one is doing just that, it goes black in a second then displays the desktop as normal on starting up. Not a big problem due the computer's P4 CPU speed, very fast start up, not so irritating as you described.