IBM Aptiva about 4 or 5 years old, running Windows98
System just seems to run pathetically slow and frequently “hangs” for a few dozen seconds, during which the cursor doesn’t respond onscreen to the mouse moving, then will catch up but again won’t respond, repeat, repeat and, finally, will work.
Similar situation with the keyboard… you’ll be typing, hear a beep and see that it didn’t get about 4 or 5 seconds of your input. You’ll back up, retype it, nothing and, finally, it’ll appear.
Video clips that I’m trying to watch for an online Defensive Driving course will hang too, causing the instructor to sound like Max Headroom. The repetitious voi-voi-voi-voi-voi-voi-voice can last for 30 seconds to a minute.
I tried unfragmenting the disk but ended the task when it too appeared to hang, first showing a few percentage points of progress and then nothing more over a several hour period.
Any ideas? Aside from just making it difficult to write a letter or surf the SDMB, this is doubling the anticipated time needed to complete the DD course, a bad thing.
Go to http://www.pcpitstop.com and run their full PC tune-up. On the test results page, find the link that says “share results with TechExpress” (on the upper right side), click the link, then copy the URL provided, and post it here. I’ll have a look.
“Your system is configured for optimal performance.”
Under Virtual Memory it’s set for Windows to manage.
Anytime it performs a task, a browser refresh or whatever, I lose cursor control for 10 to 30 seconds.
An expert came out here a month ago to advise on whether to upgrade this one or build another. He said everything looked extremely clean file wise, ran a virus checker and pointed me towards a spyware site. I logged in and ran their program. I don’t remember it prompting me to remove anything so I’m guessing either it was clean or it removed found items itself. The last thing he did, as he was leaving, was to start the disk defrag but, as mentioned, it didn’t work. They shouldn’t take days, should they?
The Windows 98 defragger is a piece of crap. It is unstable, and will freeze or restart if you have anything else running, including antivirus or screensavers. Download a free copy of Diskeeper Lite and try that. It is faster, more efficient, and it won’t freeze up or restart a million times.
well you are a little light on RAM, so it may be swapping to disk a lot. Scan the Disk for errors and defrag. If somebody can tell me what kind of RAM it uses I can most likely scrounge up some for ya (no charge)
This process will not only take days, but an infinite amount of time if you have something that writes to the HD periodically. So before starting, make sure EVERYTHING is disabled in your startup group. If the defrag process restarts itself several times, there is something else running in the background that you will have to handle.
If you have a constant connection to the Internet, unplug it while you are doing this, as you will be unprotected. Then don’t forget to re-enable the necessary stuff in the startup group after the defrag like anti-virus & firewall things, reboot and reconnect.
Personally, I think the need for defragging is overrated, anyway.
