Windows 95 & 98 users:It's happened to all of us. It's as if the great authors of the halcyon days of old are channelling their creativity through you and into your paper. Fingers are flying, ideas coalescing. Then, smack, the computer crashes. And not with one of those hangs that you can recover from Ñ instead you're forced to shut off the machine and turn it back on.
The Windows 95 start screen comes up, and then in a heart beat you're presented with ScanDisk. Don't be alarmed, this is a good thing! At the bottom of the screen the option to "Scan Now" should be highlighted. Go ahead and hit return. If you're asked to "Save a Lost Cluster" or something similar, just say, "No thanks." When it's done, it'll continue booting into Windows for you.
But what's happening here?
When you tell your computer to "Shut Down" from the Start Menu, Windows95 cleans up a whole mess of files it deals with on a second-by-second basis. It finishes writing to files that were open and closes down all the functions of Windows 95 gracefully. Basically it's doing some important house cleaning before it goes to sleep for the night. If it can't complete these shut down tasks properly (say, because you shut off the machine before it could shut down), your computer can have problems. Files might get corrupted or broken, and there might be a chunk of data on your hard drive that doesn't belong to anyone at all. Your computer knows when it hasn't been shut down properly, and tries to run ScanDisk for you to make sure that it cleans up all the things it couldn't the time before.
Windows needs a lot of files to run. A baffling number of files, really. Sometimes these files get corrupted during a crash or through too much use. Sometimes installing a new program or removing an old one will cause some of these files to get into fights with its brethren. Sometimes Windows will just hiccup. Regardless of why, occasionally Windows can't finish booting. That's where Safe Mode comes in.
Safe Mode, as its name suggests, is a safe way for Windows to run so that a user can do diagnostic checks and trouble shooting on a system. It's the bare bones version of Windows; no frills, no extras, just some windows. Obviously, this is something that is useful only to advanced users, so if you're ever forced to boot into safe mode, you've got some serious problems and need to contact the Help Desk (x4799).
Hopefully you'll never have to deal with Safe Mode. It's awfully tough to get any work done if you're stuck in it. But it is a valuable tool for figuring out what things might be ailing a machine and ways to cure it.
