I am the hero of the moment. Well thanks to the internet and its IT forums, I am. The thing is, that the youngest is currently into Noddy. Not the lead singer from Slade, I may add, but the Enid Blyton favourite character. He has been into this for some time now, and his brother managed to get 10 videos, from eBay for him for Christmas. Today, he decided that he wanted his Noddy CD Rom installing. Now bearing in mind, that this was a state-of-the-art piece of software for windows 98 (not 98se mind you), and his PC is Vista Home Basic, it was never going to be easy. Of course after installation, it would not work. It just would not autorun the start file. Tried in Win 98 and Win 95 compatibility modes, and nothing.

   So, a compromise, I thought, I’ll install it on my Windows XP machine. Not much better. It complained that I needed a minimum 3mb of virtual memory (it’s set a lot lot higher than that). So I was beginning to think that this would not happen, and we would have a bad day. I tried looking for an XP or Vista patch, but to no avail. As a last resort, I typed the whole problem into Google and hit ‘I Feel Lucky’. A games forum page came up, with the advice to install DirectX 9, which apparently runs side by side with DirectX 10 on Vista. Off I toddled to the MS website to download the file, only to find, that the download was a stub file, that opens the correct MS webpage, and installs from there. That was no good, youngest lads computer is not internet connected. Eventually found another site, and downloaded the correct files. After a little tweaking, the program ran. Hero am I (today at least).