Hi All,
I have an AMD Athlon 1 gig, with 192 megs of RAM and 64 meg video card.
This computer is very fast when I first turn it on, and the only things I use it for
are chatting and internet. If I walk away after an hour or two, and then try to go online again, it had then become very sluggish and prone to crashing.
After restarting, it will be back to its speedy self again. Have checked for viruses and spyware, and that is not the problem.
Any helpful hints or suggestions ??
Thanks !
192 MB of RAM (probably 256 MB total with 64 MB shared video) is a bit on the low side for your system. I’d bump it up to 512 MB, or more, depending on what your mainboard can support. You don’t say what OS you’re using, but the above applies especially if you’re running XP.
Running windows 98SE,. Thanks QED, but why would it start off fast, and then I don’t use it for 2 hours, and when I return it has gotten really slow and/or crashes?
Why does it not stay fast, I am only using it for chatting and internet.
When not used for 2 hours I exit out of most programs, and disconnect from my dial-up. I also use msconfig to have it start with a minimal number of programs
Windows–all flavors–loves to use its wap file. If you notice the hard drive light flickering like crazy when it’s running slow, the reason is most likely that the OS is doing massive paging to the swap file. Increasing the amount of system RAM decreases the amount of swap file paging that must be done, improving performance. The reason it does this so much after you’ve left the system alone for a while is because there are still background tasks that are done during idle time. When you come back to use it, the system must swap those background tasks back to the swap file, and retrieve your applications from it. In this case, hard drive access speed is the bottleneck that slows everything down.
Have you tried closing any programs that might be running that you aren’t using at the time. Mine does this and I’ll hit the control alt delete keys and shut down whatevers running that I don’t need. plus, dump the excess crap in your RAM go to your temporary internet folders and delete all that crap you don’t need. Thousands of cookies to sites that you just checked out or whatever else you find. I checked out a friend of mine’s PC yesterday…she was bitchin about the same thing and I pulled up the temp files and she was like “my son was where?”. Anyway, we cleaned up a bunch of that BS and damned if it didn’t pick up a BUNCH of speed. Mine does this shit all the time. That and the G-damned spyware. 
QED …did you say WAP file? Did I just get wooshed or are you still trying to get into that IIUD club? 
It could be that one of the programs you are running (even in the background) is poorly designed and has a “memory leak” which causes it to suck more and more memory as time goes on. Try turning off one program at a time and see if your problem is fixed.
I’ve also read that win98 had bad memory management issues - you might consider downloading a free memory manager utility like RAM Medic.
Here’s some more advice on speeding up win98.
I agree it may be a memory leak. You could load the task manager (CTR-ALT-DELETE) and see if the “MEM Usage” steadily increases for any of the progs you are running. Of course, some programs simply allocate more memery as needed, so a simple increase does not necessarily mean a memory leak.
What programs, exactly, are you using for chatting and internet?
Run sysmon.exe to see what is happening with your system (comes with Windows 98). Check the amount of RAM used over time. Remove ALL items (that’s right ALL items) from your startup group using msconfig, reboot, stay off the Internet, and see what happens. Run Spybot and AdAware. Run other diagnostics in this thread. Something’s bound to crop up.
Your situation is normal, that is, Gates doesn’t have a clue as to the real world and you are the innocent victim.
Definitely sounds like one of the applications being used is eating up memory, i.e. another vote for ‘memory leak’. 192MB is way beyond enough for a Win98 PC doing such light duties as web browsing and internet chat, in fact it’s enough to run several heavyweight applications simultaneously. The swap file only comes into play when the PC doesn’t have enough physical memory to do what’s asked of it, which is unlikely to be the case here.