My original was to get to know a handful of Windows 95 utility programs made by Quarterdeck Corp. Before I was done, I just wanted to be able to boot up again.

First, the utilities. The Quarterdeck utilities can't be bought as a suite, like the Norton Utilities. Many are more sophisticated than their Norton counterparts, and take up more hard drive space. So they are offering these programs as standalones -- you just buy the one you need.

Check out the Quarterdeck utility site.

I still haven't spent much time on those three. But here are four programs I have worked with, and what each does:

CleanSweep. This is an uninstall program. Its purpose is to keep your hard drive efficient by going after and destroying programs and files you don't need or want. It crumbles "cookies" attached by websites you visit and sweeps away the crumbs of temporary files created by your browser. $60.

TuneUp. This program is another effort at automated technical support masking itself as a user benefit. Software companies yearn to get the unready software they sold you fixed and upgraded. TuneUp is a program that keeps track of the updates and upgrades from the big companies, and hops on the net, downloads, and installs them for you, at your request. It comes with a basic anti-virus program. $40.

RealHelp. This is my favorite of the group. Windows 95, the most popular operating system on the market, is also the most crashprone. RealHelp keeps an eye out for developing conflicts and stops and repairs them before you crash. God knows how they foresee this, since a crash is definable as an unforeseen demand on resources. Since I installed the program, I have had a dozen crashes -- real good 'uns, too. In all but two cases, RealHelp was not only able to keep the computer from locking up, but allowed me to keep using the program in question. If you crash a lot, you will want this. Comes in Extra Strength (includes TuneUp), $60, and Regular, $40.

Partition-It and Select-It. This was the killer for me. Partition-It lets you break your hard disk into workable subdrives, a task you can do from DOS, except the interface here is nicer. Select-It lets you run more than one operating system on a single PC -- Windows, Unix, or OS2. $60.

I thought I might use the last package to simplify my son's PC, which has drives labeled from A:\ to I:\. He often has trouble finding things. I installed the programs Saturday night. Sunday morning, my son Jon, 9, booted up and the PC wouldn't recognize any drive but C:\.

We both panicked. He glared at me as if I had run over his dog. I fired off emergency e-mail and phone messages to Quarterdeck (which took two days to respond), mentioning the rupture they had caused between my son and me.

For more about my relationship with this boy.

I got the bright idea of downloading drive information from the Seagate and Maxtor sites, on my PC. Then we plugged in the information, item by painstaking item: number of cylinders, heads, size, etc. Left-brained lad that he is, Jon really helped me think through the logic of it.

But it still wouldn't boot. Finally I had Jon rummage through my collection of 2.8 million floppy diskettes, looking for a boot disk for that PC and my OnTrack Disk Manager utility. The boot disk lets you boot from a floppy, bypassing the junk on the hard disk. OnTrack is a configuration tool that comes with most new drives. I hadn't seen it in years.

We found both disks eventually and booted them up. First thing OnTrack told us was that we could have accessed it without the floppy, by hitting the spacebar during bootup. Duh.

For more on OnTrack Disk Manager.

We were so proud of ourselves, we gave each other a big hug right there at the console.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.