I should have included a few more details; In fact that's exactly what I
suggested he do, and he responded that his HDD was only 30% full with the
downloads, and that he had run Scandisk and Defrag to no avail.
He also stated that when he checked Windows resources in System Properties
it reports 75% free at start up, but when it slows down it reports less
than 25% free resources.
While I do know that System Resources is not an indicator of free RAM, he
does have 128 Mb of RAM.
At 07:36 PM 1/23/01 -0500, you wrote:
Don:
It sounds like your friend's hard drive is not only pretty near full,
but it's highely fragmented, and it's time for some housekeeping. One
good starting point would be to run scandisk and defrag -- in that
order. Before doing so, he's got to shut down all applications that are
running except systray and (I think) explorer. He'll have to do a
ctrl-alt-delete to see what's running. (There are better ways, but this
will work for now.) Scandisk should run fairly quickly, but defrag
won't. I'd suggest that he uncheck the defrag feature that optimizes the
placement of programs on the drive based on how often they are used. It
may improve performance to some extent, but it will really slow down
defragging what sounds like a very cluttered hard drive. Another thing
that might help is to set the swap file to a fixed size, but first
things first.
HTH -- Carroll
Don Kendrew wrote:
>
> A friend has asked me about a problem he has with his system slowing down.
> after a few minutes use the mouse moves slowly, and applications take
> longer and longer to perform simple tasks.
>
> He has recently been downloading many mp3's from the web, and he reports
> that the only way he has discovered to speed up his system is to remove
> these downloads from his hard drive.
>
> He tells me that he has a Compaq Presario, purchased within the last six
> months that uses Windows 98 as the OS. Further details I don't have at the
> moment.
>
> Without looking at his machine, I'm at a loss to tell him why this is
> happening. Does anyone have any suggestions?
>
> don kendrew
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