WIN 98 Stops and Starts..

techguy

HI Guys,
My window strarted acting up a lot lately so I cleaned out all the spyware and scanned with NAV 2003. Still one problem,when i open a new program close an app or select a function the computer decides to pause everything and resume in about 20 to 30 seconds..Very annonying.I think it is the HD that is all in a heap so I am going to run win98 disk defrag tonight.Will this help and what other HD Utilities/ Maintanence programs are there out there for keeping my PC on form.

Thanks,
Hakko

Egyptian

try a Scandisk, might help?

__

techguy

Rapid Reply...
I'll try that also,thanks.
Im just on the tucows site now looking for utilities..
Hakko

Lump

Windows 98 is seven years old TBH... it's going to run slow if you have new programmes on it... Installing NAV 2003 probably slowed it even more. I suggest installing Win 2000 if you can get a copy. Runs like a dream on my Celeron 333Mhz with 196 megs ram.

What are your hardware specs?

John

Capt'n Midnight

As others have pointed out before window 98 has like a "half-life" it decays over time due to cluttered junk eg: uninstalling an app rarely removes all its entries from the registry, and ONLY if all else fails , a clean install can get it back the way it was.

If the ONLY slowness is 20-30 seconds at app startup then it's timing out - check for missing drives(network / zip etc.) / drivers - have you un-installed anything recently. One option is to use a different version of explorer the one from windows 95 - www.litepc.com/98lite.html

I really hate the way explorer in XP times out too - it's a general windows annoyance that will probably be claimed to be fixed in the next version.. :rolleyes:

It's not worth buying 2000 to install on older HW, even if you could get a non-OEM copy resonable. You'd need a better machine to run it on to. Again what are the specs - RAM / MHz ?

Lump

As I said, 2000 runs fine on my 333Mhz.


John

Capt'n Midnight

Lump wrote:

As I said, 2000 runs fine on my 333Mhz.

'cos you got lots more RAM than most 333's , [envy] I've only got 96 in my 333 [/envy]

The problem with 2K is not the perfomance (fine once you have enough ram) it's just that's it's not worth buying a copy for a older PC , when you could probably pick up a better spec PC with an OEM 2000 sticker on it for the same.

Lump

Meh...

John

techguy

Im running a Dell Dimension 350Mhz with 128mb Ram..how will win 2k perform on this? Will it "decay" like 98? I might pick up a couple of megs of ram if i can get it cheap am i right in assuming this is the cheapest way to boost performance?
Any utilities to maintain the hard disk btw?
Hakko

Lump

TBH, I'd back up your stuff and re-install windows.

John

techguy

sorry its a 700mhz pc, i will prob reinstall win when i have the time....
Hakko

Lump

700 Mhz, install 2000.

John

techguy

Yea thats what I will do. Does anyone know where I will get a cheap copy of win2k? Or even better still does someone have a disc to sell?
btw is 2k any good?does it use resources more efficiently and crash less?

Hakko

Capt'n Midnight

Most copies of 2K are OEM - this means the license is non transferrable. CD is no use without a transferrable license like I said it's could be cheaper to get a second hand PC with a license.

Microsoft claimed that 2K crashes 40 times less often than 98 and 17 times less often than NT. Then again they have said similar things about crashes in the past usually promises about less URE's have been fulfilled by renaming then GPF's etc. Yes 2000 is more stable than 98 but it's still not as solid as a fileserver running NT3.51 eg: still dead easy to kill 2K with a dodgy driver. XP and 2003 are not much better though they warn you more about bad drivers.

Also don't upgrade 98 to 2000 - do a clean install. Also if you have unusual hardware it may not work in 2K - examples include some scanners, many winmodems, and some serial mice that I've had working fine in everything else.

Reducing colour depth will free up some resources in 98 and may run slightly faster.

techguy

My modem is a HCF Connexant V90 56K but I am currently using a netopia cayman BB modem. I have a sony dvdr 510 AK also.
Have you any experience with these?
If I can get my hands on 2K disc for cheap then I will install other than that it will just be a fresh install of 98 every so often..

Hakko

techguy

I have just d/l and installed the diskeeper professional demo. I analysed the hard drive and the current read time is 22 seconds the program says it can make a 77% improvement.
I then told diskeeper to defragment the drive but when it gets to 30% the whole computer crashes..I have tried this 4 times and the thing crashes at 30% every time..

What will I do now,maybe the program(Or PC) can't handle this amount of fragmentation.How else can I solve the problem?

Thanks,
Hakko

formatman

you need to disable norton before running scandisc, and also try running scandisk in safe mode , I have had mixed results with HAV 2003 under 98

Gateway had a great program called GWSCAN that will tell you if you HDD is ok or not at a low level , if you get their universal boot disc from their support site . Then after booting from the disc go in to the gateway directory and the exe is gwsan ( run all from dos prompt)

techguy

thanks formatman.
I tried scndisc in safe mode but it said eveything was ok and i presume nav was disabled(Safe mode)..
Im just looking for the gateway boot disk now.

When I get GWSCAN and if it tells me my HD is bad what program will I get to fix it?

Thanks,
Hakko

the_syco

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

'cos you got lots more RAM than most 333's , [envy] I've only got 96 in my 333 [/envy]

The problem with 2K is not the perfomance (fine once you have enough ram) it's just that's it's not worth buying a copy for a older PC , when you could probably pick up a better spec PC with an OEM 2000 sticker on it for the same.

Currently running 2K on a pentium 233Mhz, 128MB RAM(got it at shop4memory.com) laptop. Runs smoothly enough for any word, net browsing, etc.

techguy

I just completed full test with gwscan from dos and it gave the all clear.
Sorry to be annoying you all but this mean the slowness is being caused by something else?

Hakko

Edit: I just ran speedup my pc 2.0 and that of the 128mb of physical memory 94% is being used..This seems like bad news to me.I only have IE Explorer and speedup my pc open.Ans the CPU Freq. is 798Mhz wow an extra 98Mhz :eek:

formatman

will post some suggestions later , too nice to come home from the beach at the moment

formatman

to get you started though download the demo of spyhunter from :

www.enigmasoftwaregroup.com ,

great to identify some spyware and viruses norton has missed out on occasions

post a jpeg or screen dump of your add remove programs also and I'll have a gander

techguy

Thanks for that, i have nothing installed at the moment to capture the screen but im satisified theres nothing worrying in there anyway..

Windows defrag seems to be doing the job now anyway..I'll give enigma a shot all the same..

Thanks.