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?

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Mike...

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