What kind of games do you run on your system?  How much free hd
space do you have? I think the specs that you've listed about your pc sounds
like it's a pretty good pc with quite a bit of life left in it, take into
account there will always be the power hungry addicts that cry more is
better but you can only do so much with what you got so there's no use in
crying about it.  Certain things to consider: You need the right balance
between RAM and virtual memory. You can have too much memory. Pentium boards
based on Intel's 430xx design cannot cache more than 64MB. Any accessed
memory more than 64MB is non-cachable, and performance will drop. How much
it drops depends on the speed and quality of the memory. Of course, having a
lot of RAM doesn't hurt if you have a newer chipset that can cache all
available RAM. Virtual Memory is an integral part of Windows' operation. If
your accessible RAM can handle all the programs you're using, your system
will indeed rely less on virtual memory, so performance will improve because
your system won't access the hard drive as often.  But this does not mean
you should pack your machine with RAM and turn off virtual memory. Virtual
memory is an integral part of Windows' operation. Even though you might use
it less, Windows still needs it to some extent. You'll reach a point where
it's no longer cost-effective to add RAM. Tests have shown that as RAM size
goes up, its benefits decrease. Between 64MB and 128MB is about all the RAM
that can make a difference in Windows 95 and 98. The only real benefit from
having more than 128MB of RAM is in graphics processing or high-end
multimedia production. Also check out any background applications running
when you boot up win98, they monitor just about everything imaginable in
your computer from sys.temps to storage availability to virus detection,
these programs do it all but for every great function they perform, there
are drawbacks.  RAM can suffer to the point of your PC going brain dead. If
this happens, you have a few choices available to free your RAM. The first
choice you have is to turn off the memory-resident programs , everything but
your antivirus software.  All of these features rely heavily on RAM and tend
to overburden the system by not flushing RAM when you open and close
programs. Use scan disk once a week, and defrag using any of the popular
utilities available. Very important - you should monitor how many icons
appear in the system tray. This can be found in the bottom right corner. The
more icons you have there, equals less memory available at any given time.
Simply right-click on those icons to turn off the ones you don't need. Don't
delete these files, you're just need to disable them to free up available
memory. Also go into these programs and edit the options, if you don't need
some of them to startup everytime you boot your pc, change the software
options so that they don't populate your system tray.  Also, you might not
need to keep the antivirus software running in the background all the time.
Also try removing the 64mb stick of ram and examine your pc's performance
when it runs with only 128mb of ram just to see if win98 runs a little
faster. If you notice your pc runs a little faster this way it could be the
case that your win98 pc was having problems using more than 128mb of ram -
this sounds crazy but I've personally seen improvements just because of
this. Also take the time to review everything you've installed on your
computer and remove any unnecessary software that you rarely use, clean up
your windows registry, install all the available critical updates for win98,
this will be pretty much all you can do to improve performance on your pc.
Try dual booting win98 with win2k or winxp to see if maybe certain games or
software run better in other os environments.  Hope this info helps more
than it confuses.

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "andre chiasson" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Friday, August 23, 2002 10:32 PM
> Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Computer slow with games but not with Digital Audio
>
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > Here are the hardware related info:
> >
> > Duron 650
> > 192 Ram   (1 X 128Mb  and 1X 64Mb)
> > AGP 32Mb ATI Xpert 2000   driver version 4.11.6222
> > A7V Asus Motherboard
> > Maxtor 15 Gb 7200 RPM
> > Win98 SE
>

         PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
                     visit our download web page at:
                  http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml