When I've seen this before, Win 98 (first edition, presumably) is ready to completely crash and burn.  You can use all the tips and tricks you get, but usually it does no good.  I would prepare friend to reformat and install a decent operating system.  On its own, Win 98 is passable, but as an upgrade from Win 95, that's pushing the envelope.  Tell your friend to do a full clean install off the upgrade disk if he has his old Win 95 disk.

>Hey folks,
>
>I am diagnosing a Windows 98 system. The user is complaining about
>general sluggishness and instability.
>
>The instability issues are as follows: general GPFs, crashes, and an
>occasional-to-often total lock-up that's accompanied by a black
>screen, then a vertical blue or green bar down the right half of the
>monitor.
>
>It's a PII-300 with 32 Megs of RAM running Win98 FE which had been
>upgraded from Windows 95.
>
>The system takes nearly five minutes to boot. He is running a number
>of tasks at boot-up but even booting into Safe Mode took nearly three
>minutes (with a lot of unusual disk crunching sounds, I might add).
>
>
>The first thing I did was add RAM. The user is running several
>background tasks at boot-up and there were 2 megs physical memory free
>under normal conditions with a fat swap file.
>
>The second thing I did was run a thorough scandisk and defrag.
>
>There is virtually no improvement or in system stability.
>
>My next plan is to take a very critical look at what's coming up at
>boot time. (One of the things is "Safe & Sound" which is taking a good
>twenty seconds to mount "backup volumes.")
>
>But barring all that. The biggest concern for me, at the moment, is
>how long it took for the system to come up in Safe Mode. Three minutes
>seems quite excessive. And the sounds this drive made ...
>
>Well, I'm just wondering what you guys would look at next...
>
>Also, I'm wondering what you guys look at when someone reports things
>like this about their system?
>
>Hmmm... he is running the lateast McAfee defs. Could there be a virus?
>
>
--




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