Friends,
I ask humbly for your help. I know so little about this machine. My problem is the web is getting slow. I go to this message board or Ebay and it is so slow I can’t stand it! I use AOL 8.0 and Windows 98. I have no money for new PC so I tried to help what I have to run better, deleting cookies, deleteing temporary internet files and closing conflicting software via CTRL ALT DELETE. Yet when I go to AOL system info, the memory tells me - 63 MB total 100% load.
I am not sure if the problem is hardware or software, so I am not sure what I should do. I tried using something other than AOL and downloaded NetZero and ATT but they were no faster or better for me.
What have I done wrong and where do I look for help?
Even for win 93 the minimum is 128. 256 for win XP. And that’s the bare minimum!
So go out an dbuy yourself more RAM. But before you, make sure you know what kind you’ll need, and how much total your motherboard will support.
After installing it, run msconfig (do a search for it in your windows directory) and make sure only important programs are running at system start up. Defrag your hradrive and download “adware” and “easy cleaner” from the web (do a search on google). With adware, you’ll get rid of any ad-based programs sucking up your bandwidth, and easy cleaner will get rid of unecessary files for you.
After all this you SHOULD notice an improvement in your comp’s performance.
Perhaps go into msconfig, and under the start up tab, uncheck any unneccessary things from running at start up.
(start…run…type in: msconfig click ok…and check under the start up tab) Here’s a list to show you what is safe to uncheck.
64mb ram running win98 is more than enough for web surfing.
when you hit Ctrl Alt Del the only things you should see is ‘explorer’ and ‘systray’. you might want to install ‘ad-aware’ or ‘spybot’ if there might be spyware hogging the resources.
i think more info is needed etc, failing which a reformat is always the easiest solution if you have the time and know how.
your pc is mostly not responsible for the ping to these boards, there is little you can do to make these hamsters run any faster…
Daizy, Really dust it? You mean inside the tower? I have only dusted the outside.
Thanks for your help all. I have a dumb question, where is the memory? I had a new hard drive put in with 40 gb. How can I have used that up already? Where is this memory thing?
AND
I have doen the CTRL ALT DELETE process but then when I go on line again and check it there are all kinds of things I thought I took out BACK AGAIN. Why won’t they stay away?
Stellablue, there are, in effect, two different types of ‘memory’ in your computer. There’s your hard drive, with 40 g, and there’s also your RAM. You have 63Mb, and for Win98 and just surfing the net, this should be enough. I doubt you have used up all 40 Gb on your hard drive, to the point where it would affect performance.
Otherwise, just follow the advice already given in this thread. I recommend downloading Ad-Aware, a program that’s pretty good at getting rid of Adware and Spyware, both of which can hog up resources.
Kinthalis, I’d like a cite for that please. Considering I’m currently sitting in front of a PC running XP with 128Mb RAM. Struggles a bit, but I wouldn’t say 256 was the bare minimum.
I have used pc’s running win xp on less than 256 MB and things are gruelingly slow. You can hear the hardrive screaming for help as the swap disk is flooded with data.
Sure enough, as you run out of RAM in which to load running applications, the extra resources are written to the drive. This usually happens when you are (at the same time) reading from the drive to load the data into memory, which is being written bakc to the drive since there isn’t enough RAM. I took me easily 5 times as long to update windows XP to the Service pack 1, on my mom’s machine (128 MB of RAM) as it did one of my own last time I re-installed the OS (640 MB RAM).
This is especially true when you run more than one app at a time (and who doesn’t). She might use AOL, have a browser window open, and be trying to listen to her latest MP3.
She needs more RAM. And at the current price, it’s a suggestion that will very likely improve performance on her comp for very little monetary sacrifice.
256 is my recommended minimum for windows XP and I’m sticking to that.
You dust the inside of your comp every once in a while. If you have a nice fan setup where there is more positive pressure than negative, then you’d have to do this less times year, but otherwise…
The main reason being that dust acts as an insulator. This makes your comp run hot which could decrease the lifetime of some components (your CPU especially), and could contribute to system instability.
xash beat me to it. However, here are the system requirements for the other Windows operating systems:
Windows 98 has a minimum of 16MB of memory (24 recommended). IIRC, anything above 32MB wouldn’t produce a noticeable speed improvement.
I would like to point out that Windows 98 Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del) does not show all the processes running on your computer like Windows NT flavor operating systems will. End It All from Ziff-Davis Software will show you every process running on your computer and will shut down everything that’s unneccessary and still leave your computer stable.
Those minimum and recommended system requirements from MS’s site are the bare minimum to run the OS alone without problems.
My experience has shown me that those memory requirements are NOT enough for MOST people. Because MOST people do not turn their computers and stare at their OS’s background all day long.
If you do anything except fool around with the OS you will benefit from more RAM.
Of course, the actual improvement in system performance from more RAM will be encumbent on the specific activity of the user.
If you like to watch movies online, if you play games, if you like to listen to mp3’s while surfing the net, if you want to extend the life of your hardisk, and improve performance when doing all these things, as well as runnign memory hogging apps (video editing, picture editing, etc), then you need a decent amount of RAM on your system.
I find it funny that in this day an age people are trying to tell me that 32 megs of ram on a system is overkill! Ridiculous!
I guess I should restate my earlier remark about Windows 98 and 32MB of memory.
Anything over 32MB won’t speed up the boot process any faster than it already is. Provided you’re starting with a clean boot (no extraneous programs loading via Startup or registry), you’ll get to the desktop just as fast as if you had 64MB or more. Microsoft themselves claim IE is part of the Windows operating system, so in fact you’re already running it while “staring at the background”. Ever browsed the Internet via Windows Explorer?
Watching movies, playing games, and listening to mp3’s is much more processor intensive than memory intensive. If you do these things simultaneously then a processor upgrade is probably in order, as well as a memory upgrade. While more memory won’t necessarily make your programs run faster, it will allow you to run more of them at the same time, or run ones that have high memory requirements.
Windows 9x is notorious for allowing its resources (user, GDI, and system) to fall below acceptable levels. No amount of extra memory will alleviate that. Windows NT flavors address memory differently and generally do not have this problem.
xash beat me to it. However, here are the system requirements for the other Windows operating systems: