On Sat, 14 Mar 1998 21:58:29 -0800, Stan Bialowas
<[log in to unmask]> mentioned:

>It was very fast right after formatting & reloading win95,
>but as I filled the drive with all the PCCillin, First Aid, & Quarterdeck
>Cleansweep software, it got too slow running these in the background.

Several of my clients had problems with their PCs almost crawling, and
one thing they had in common was Cleansweep running in the background.
First Aid has TONS of complaints in their forum on CompuServe, so there
is a program I would not run. Many anti-virus programs slow down your PC
noticeably, one that does NOT is Dr. Solomon's Anti-virus (uses only
about 380 KB of memory) Try disabling Cleansweep, FirstAid, and
PCCillin, and you may be very pleasantly amazed.
        To keep your swap file quicker, you can try creating a partition of
about 100 MB, defragging it, and then assigning that as your permanent
swap file.
        To tell what is going on with your memory, there is an excellent
program that is NOT freeware, but well worth the bucks, IMHO, called
Norton Utilities. I am using version 2.0, which is tried and true. Be
careful if you buy version 3.0, the earlier releases had a problem with
some Diamond Stealth video cards, but you just download the update from
the Symantec site (the update system is built in to the program) and it
should be fixed. Using Norton Utilities, go to the Utilities dropdown
menu, then to Information, then System Information, and one of the tabs
is for memory. It will show you how much memory total you have, how much
each program that's running is using, and you can sort, to show the hogs
at the top of the list. It's a REAL education to see that a blank
document in Word 97 uses over 12 MB of RAM, for instance. I hope that
helps.

--
     Best Regards,
     Ron Steers in Sunny Sacramento <[log in to unmask]>
     Computer * Support, Software Training & Optimizing
     On the Web: http://www.ns.net/~rsteers/