I recently bought a ibm thinkpad 356 running 3.1. The performance is fine but there is only 797,223k left in the memory. The former owner had everything on it including a movie player and a sound recorder program. They also used Stacker to compress the hard drive.

So how would I,

a. Remove unwanted programs? I am used to the add remove function or the delete function. Win 3.1 doesn't have that.
b. uncompress the hard drive and remove what is in there?

I've already gotten copies of win 3.1 and dos 7.2(?) the last version of Dos was used. so should I just f/disk and repartion and start over?

If a program doesn't have an uninstaller, there's no easy way to remove it.

"there is only 797,223k left in the memory."

Do you mean disk space?

If you intend to uncompress a drive, you would require sufficient room on hard drive to uncompress to

You may well be further ahead to start over - - but "DOS7.2"??

The 'last version of DOS' (from M$) was 6.22 - there are packages consisting of Win9x DOS around, but kind of overkill on such a humble machine

You don't likely need to repartition either - the existing partition should be fine

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I typed "ver" at the c prompt and 7.0 is installed.

Can the disk compression program just be removed with deltree? I don't think that would work though.

I would have no problem wiping and starting over but the modem card does work and I don't know if there are drivers available for such a old card (14.4 kbps). Would the drivers be native to win3.1 or were the a seperate program that came with the card?

and there is also os2/warp installed as well, does that have to wiped or just leave it be? I tried to open os/2 but it just crashes the system.

and thanks for helping.

The reason why I thought that a repartion may be neccesary is when I did a reinstall of win98 on a old box, they had compressed the hard drive and the only way to get rid of the compression was to repartion the hard drive.

There is no version of M$-DOS that returns a "7" when 'ver' is invoked, likely this is some other flavour

" the only way to get rid of the compression was to repartion the hard drive."

No, that's not true - a compressed 'drive' is merely very large (hidden) file aka Compressed Volume File (CVF, in M$). These are dependant upon drivers loaded from config.sys etc - at any rate, format would erase everything. The situation you describe is somewhat different - Windows won't (readily) let you do a lot of things, and that would have been M$ Drvspace

Your question appears to be increasing in complexity - OS2? Modem drivers?

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There is also a icon labeled "Dos 7.0 tools" that allows for the backing up of dos and win 3.1.

In the "welcome to thinkpad" readme, it stated that both win 3.11 and os2 came preinstalled. I also found the "delete" function in the file manager, and removed some useless programs (games, audio files, a non working Cd program) however when I rechecked "mem" the same amount appeared. Delete probably only changed a letter in the programs pathway.

where it gets strange is in the dos prompt i tried to run scandisk,scndsk, and recieved a "bad command or file name" message. but chkdsk and defrag both worked normally.

when i tried to use the "back up" function to save the "pcmia" manager function it stated that "you have bad clusters" That is what makes the scandisk problem even more intractable.

I had thought about just wiping the drive and installing "win95 companion".

Ok, but there is still no such thing as MS DOS "7" - for that matter, a system running DOS & Win31 and OS2 seems... mighty odd

You need to make up your mind what you want to do, and then determine if that's even feasible on this limited machine. Might be an idea to identify just what DOS you're talking about.

The 95 'companion' CD is not an OS

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Doubtless the installed OS is PC DOS 7 - not terribly surprising on an IBM (although your failure to notice is, a little)

Presumably your DOS installation disks are the same (and labelled)?

'mem' reports memory usage - you continue to confuse that with disk space.

Is this just about your first computer? You seem (more than) a little lost

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I'm just going to remove win3.11 and re install. And this is not quite my first computer it is my first time working on win 3.11 though.

How would I remove the disk compression?

jboy is correct, ther is IBM's "PCDOS" 7xx, so I'd be careful about trying to "mix and match" boot disks and utilities ---some may just not work right.

I did find a place, a while back, if you need utilites and drivers for your Thinkpad. I don't believe IBM, uh, "Lenovo" has them or else they're well hidden.

I'm not very fluent in W3x, I never really used it much--went from DOS right to W9x.

What little I've done, I just simply deleted the folders (directories) associated with whatever programs, and then removed the Icons.

Don't forget, that W3x is mostly "just DOS"

It's been some time since I used Stac compression - and for that matter, IBM DOS came with it's own disk compression software (superstor?)

The information you've related so far hasn't been all that accurate - you're the one in front of this thing - check your documentation

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Thanks for the advice, the Dos is PC dos 7.0. I simply fdisked then formatted C:. Almost no problems but the LOCK/UNLOCK function tripped me up somewhat. I now have a "ERROR" message on start up that says that I need to PHDISK to delete the files with long names.

I reinstalled PC dos, is there anyway to phdisk from there? Or can I use a disk utility like "kill disk"?

IBM DOS 7 had Stacker included with it.

This might apply:

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000348.htm

See at the bottom of that page it says to disable file to disk turn off all power management.

Best

Thanks for the article but the BIOS just has not opened. I tried all of the key combos and nothing happened, except for a stuck key error then it goes right into the message "PHDISK needed to disable..."

Any suggestions short of target practice???