Hi Mike, you mentioned that this was an upgrade from Win95, do you mean that
the os was an upgrade installation vs. a clean install?  That might be part
of the problem.  I myself would have formatted the hd and did a clean win98
install. Win98FE is a great os, win98se is great too but I've never had
problems with win98fe. Some people may say that the system doesn't have
enough ram but I don't entirely agree with that. (win98 isn't a resource pig
like me, 2k, xp, nt,etc.) How big is the hd in that system? In my office I
have several older pc's (some might call them boat anchors), old
digital(who?!)3000 series machines with amd166mhz mmx cpu's, 32mg ram, 2gb
harddrive,1mb video on mb, etc. and they run win98fe with no problems
considering they're also connecting to an nt4 network, running office97,
as400 emulation, email, internet, etc.  Are you running fat16 or fat32? You
should be running fat32.  The fact that you're harddrive is making a lot of
unusual sounds and your pc requires 5min. to boot may indicate harddrive
failure of some sort or there's a really old overworked/underperforming
harddrive in that box and you need to replace it with something newer.
Norton Disk Doctor & Norton Speed Disk are great apps for
diagnosing/fixing/speeding up your hd and you should consider trying them or
something similar, they may help you with your sluggish hd. (I originally
used these apps only my servers but they work great on the end user's
desktop as well). Have you applied all of the available critical windows
updates? How about reinstalling drivers for your main system components?
What are you running for antivirus software? I use Norton AV, I hear that
McAfee is good too, update your virus def's and do a thorough scan to make
sure this isn't a sircam (sircam will slow up your system big time!) or
similar virus problem. Also, you may want to consider running regcleaner to
kill off any unnecessary apps which may be booting up at startup, it also
comes with an automatic registry cleaner tool which will clean up a lot of
the junk that your registry gets cluttered with from all the
installs/uninstalls we perform on our pc's. Best of all it's free!

Let me know what ends up happening with that system...



Rob, winnipeg





Original Message: 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 ...

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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