It was a great surprise for me to get dozens of emails complaining about what I myself would have never thought of. Many people installed my Rainy Screensaver ( http://www.elasticsystems.com/rainy/ ) and found it quite entertaining. But then they got upset because their previous screensaver was very fun too and now it wouldn't come up anymore.

What has happened to their old screensaver after installation of another one? Today we will deal with this question.

Probably, many of you will find this information rather obvious. I am really sorry for not being very helpful to this part of my readers this time. But I receive too many emails of described nature. This leaves me with hope that some people will learn something new in their quests for becoming Screensaver Gurus.

Here we go. The root of problem is that screensaver installation hides many steps happening behind scene. This is very convenient but it's what makes answer to our question not so obvious for many people.

I hope you were following my articles. In Windows Screensavers Explained I told you about place where screensavers live in your system. But don't worry if you missed that article. Here's information you need.

By Stephen Bucaro

Troubleshooting a Windows problem is a bit difficult when system freezes up or display becomes unintelligible. You need a way to get Windows to bypass some of its complexity and bloat so system can start, allowing you to perform troubleshooting. Windows provides several alternate startup modes just for that purpose.

To access these alternate startup modes, start your computer and immediately after startup beep, press [F8] key. The startup menu will display as shown below.

1. Normal 2. Logged (BOOTLOG.TXT) 3. Safe mode 4. Step-by-step confirmation Enter a choice: 1

Press number key for your choice and then press [Enter] key.

1. Normal allows you to get out of startup menu and resume starting Windows normally if you pressed [F8] key accidentally.

2. Logged causes Windows to log its startup activity in a file named bootlog.txt in drives root directory. Bootlog.txt will be a very long file. Open bootlog.txt with Windows Notepad or DOS Edit and search for a line that contains word "failure".

If Windows freezes before completing startup, last line in bootlog.txt might give you a clue to cause of problem. You may find that one or more steps fail during startup process. Don't assume those are cause of your current problem. Those steps may have been failing all along and you didn't know it.