we run windows 95 on a 4 year old compaq and it is slow and stops completely sometimes-will this $90 windows 98 upgrade actually speed it up a bit and run programs faster like it claims or will it screw it up more?
also does having a hard drive that is almost full slow a computer down?
Don’t do it. According to one site, http://www.tweak3d.net, I think, Windows 98 crashes something like six times more often than a completely updated version of W95.
Furthermore, W98 makes even worse demands on your memory resources than W95 did. The “speed up” they claim you will notice is largely because you need a minimum of 32 MB of RAM to run it, preferably 64.
An almost full hard drive is guaranteed to slow your system down.
Sofa King is right, don’t upgrade to 98. If I were you I’d use that money to buy more RAM for the computer. Try to clear up some space on your hard drive if possible. Having 200mb or more of free hd space would be good.
djf750, where are you gonna get the 200 or so megs you need to put w98 on?
Clean the HD, use the Scandisk & defrag. Defrag is gonna take you hours probably if you haven’t done it. Run it from the dos prompt. At the dos prompt type: defrag
That’ll really speed things up, but you should run scandisk first if you can.
98 is evil, evil, evil!! Don’t do it!
It’s huge, it’s finiky, it locks up a lot as has already been mentioned and it degrades and has to be reinstalled after awhile, or that’s been the experience of myself and the guy that works on my system.
If I knew before what I do now I would never had upgraded.
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- If a computer is hanging completely, I seriously doubt that it is a problem with not defragging or not having enough RAM installed. It should be able to finish running big programs, it should just take a long time to do it.
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- Having a hard drive that is almost full can slow some things way down, like running defrag. I recently moved 5.5 gigs of stuff on a 6 gig HD to a 20 gig, and it was a big improvement in access time, but the newer HD had faster access time specs as well as being much larger capacity. For most programs, though, I never saw any real big speed improvement.
- I have a ~3.5 yr old Acer Aspire running Win98, and it only crashes on two pieces of software I have, and I know that they crash other computers running other operating systems also, so those instances are the software, not the OS. It also has problems after running a couple mods of games I have, but not the original games themselves, so I do have to restart after playing those mods. I have reformatted a couple times because bad programs I installed had screwed aaalllll my sheeet up: after installing THAT program, immediately afterwards all kinds if stuff didn’t work right (even in other programs). The computer has never asked me to re-insert the OS CD for anything ever. No bull.
- I understand that OEM companies attach their own setup and other misc. code to the OS installation on the OEM-CD and that causes many brand-specific problems, but I am hardly an expert. Retail versions are said to have fewer problems.
- Win 95 doesn’t support USB, does it? Most of my toys are USB, and the next couple I have planned are too. For that reason alone, 95 is a goner. Lately I have also seen that some modern software specifies that it requires Win98, minimum.
- Win98 is bigger and slower than 95, but not really that much slower, when you count the seconds involved.
— If you haven’t noticed, if you ask about OS’s on the net you get a disproportionate number of certain comments: - no Windows OS ever works ever at all (the computers just sit there blank),
- and (you didn’t get it yet in this thread, but you likely will) Linux works and runs everything perfectly all the time always (except for, um, some stuff that isn’t available for Linux, but that’s just stupid stuff anyway, and after you get used to not using that stuff anymore you’ll hardly miss it).
---------Choose your poison. - MC
DO NOT spend money one windows 98. Reformatting the thing and reinstalling 95 might help. THat way you can start fesh and free up the space currently being used by all the junk you don’t use anymore. Don’t do this if you can’t back up all your documents, or if you don’t have the installation disks for your programs or drivers for your hardware.