I loaded a Windows 98 SE image from a PC onto an Acer laptop. After loading various other drivers, the Acer laptop functions well apart from a compatibility mode problem, which relates to the A drive. Since the laptop does not have an A drive, I haven’t a clue as to how to get rid of something which doesn’t quite exist. I have looked through the Microsoft Knowledge base and this forum, but all compatibility mode questions and answers seem to deal with devices which exist rather than those that don’t. I have been into system configuration on the laptop and un-ticked autoexec and config., but this hasn’t worked. In Device Manager there was no reference to floppy disk drives or controllers, so I went into ‘Add new hardware’ and tried adding an A drive, which I managed to do, and then removed it via ‘Device Manager’. However, this had no effect. My compatibility mode problem is still there. Anyone got any ideas? Thanks. Sven

Can you elaborate on when you get the compatibility mode problem, please. Do you get an error message? Please copy it exactly.

Sven - Windows reads it's installed devices from your config.sys and BIOS. I would start the computer, and press whatever key gets you into the BIOS Setup, and make sure that there is no floppy drive defined there. You don't have to be realistic to be cynical, but you DO have to be cynical to be realistic!

To ham30: The message in System Properties,Performance is 'Drive A is using MS-DOS compatibility mode file system'. According to the help information, this should only affect Drive A, but can it affect other aspects of operation? For example, I can only type seven characters in 'Word'( I have reloaded this program twice) before getting an illegal operation message and, at times, the laptop is slow to respond or freezes when I mouse click an item. To Doormat Thanks for that, but Drive A doesn't get a look-in in the BIOS. Sven

I don't see how the compatibility problem could cause your other problems, but I have see stranger things happen. I would try removing the floppy disk controller in the device manager, if you haven't already. I worry about the fact that you imaged the system from another PC. If you can't find a better solution, I suggest that you boot up in safe mode. Start regedit and delete the Hkey_Local_Machine/Enum key. That will remove all drivers and let windows start with a clean slate. When you reboot you will have to install all the drivers again. I suspect that the word problem is caused by something else, but I have no idea what.

Hi Sven If the laptop has a bay that can take either a floppy frive or a CDROM drive, then you will see the Compatibilty Mode message whenever the floppy drive is not in the bay. This is normal, and does not signify a problem. Krystyna

Thank you to everyone for the comments. I’ve managed to get a laptop which runs very smoothly by working my way through the registry and removing all references to floppy drives, controllers and so on. I used a registry cleaner to get rid of any other junk, just to make sure that nothing else was causing a problem. I used ‘Tweak’ to get rid of the floppy drive icon in the ‘C’ drive window. The intermittent screen freezing has now disappeared. The compatibility mode problem message is still there, but it doesn’t appear to be having any adverse effect at all. It appears now to be simply a message with no real meaning. Thanks to Krystyna - nice to get a similar view. As for Word, I had been using Office 2000 so I just deleted the whole lot again and installed Office XP which works fine. I didn’t try Office 2000 after my work on the registry, but I wish I had just to see if it was working alright again. What really bugs me now is how I spelt ‘compatibility’ at the start of this thread! Sven Forkbeard.