Need help with emachine, recovery CD.

[qacwac]

Hi all. My younger brother has an emachine. He has installed a ton of crappy software on it and it needs to be reformatted. However he lost the CD and in addition whenever you click anywhere on the screen it opens up the window to run winzip. I couldn't figure out how to do anything, even shutdown. So my questions are:

1. Is the recovery CD for his emachine unique or could I use someone else's CD for say a different processor speed, etc.

2. Where can I get a replacement CD? The website has no email tech support and my dad's not going to want to have to shell out $20 for a phone call?

3. Any quick answer to what is dorked up with the winzip opening all the time?

Thanks.
In case you need to know the emachine has:
533mHz, 64 RAM, 15 GB HD, DVD-ROM Win98
Serial number qaa02 005 00130
Part number 504109
number ETOWER 533ID2

 

[zlady]

Hi qacwac,

>>1. Is the recovery CD for his emachine unique or could I use someone else's CD for say a different processor speed, etc.<<

I think the Emachine cd (at least this is true for the 5 or 6 emachines I've had to work on) has both the utility to restore the HD and the standalone drivers for the operating system that came with the PC. I bet you could do without it if you can find drivers for the hardware in it, especially if you have another Emachine CD that might have those same drivers on it. I had problems getting generic PCTel modem drivers to work once and was forced to use the drivers on the original Restore CD. Everything else in the PC worked with drivers I'd gotten from somewhere else and I was able to load Win98 with an actual Win98SE CD.

>>2. Where can I get a replacement CD? The website has no email tech support and my dad's not going to want to have to shell out $20 for a phone call?<<

It IS hard to find older model emachine support and your model's CD was listed as unavailable (*sigh*) at http://www.pcfactoryoutlet.com/emachines/. so maybe you could load your own operating system and use the drivers on a Restore CD from a system that uses the same component as yours (remember, I only had trouble with the modem...and a little trouble finding audio drivers now that I remember) or download drivers from other places.

>>3. Any quick answer to what is dorked up with the winzip opening all the time?<<

Are you going to start fresh anyway? If so, can you ignore this problem?

Good luck to you. Maybe someone else will have a better answer for you!

zlady

 

[qacwac]

Thanks zlady. I'll give it a try this weekend hopefully.

 

[goraj]

try this compgeeks web site ,here,under other stuff they have all the drivers for e500,e600 and other system