[jforfar]

I have Windows 98SE and find that I have to hit the reset button five to ten time per day because the screen has frozen. Ctrl-alt-del doesn't work - I can't even use the off button. I have office 97 and sometimes it can take up to a minute to load excel or word. Same thing for internet explorer and outlook express. I have Spybot, AVG, PC-cillin. If anyone has any ideas I sure would appreciate some help.

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You might start by opening My Computer, right clicking on C: and choosing Properties and see how much disk space you have left and when you last defragmented the drive and checked it for errors. You should want to keep about 20% free disk space, and as much as 50% if it's convenient. Use disk cleanup before defragmenting. Scandisk and defragment will generally run better in Safe Mode.

If that doesn't help it you may want to go to the malware forum and run their checks.

[Tyger]

You might start by opening My Computer, right clicking on C: and choosing Properties and see how much disk space you have left and when you last defragmented the drive and checked it for errors. You should want to keep about 20% free disk space, and as much as 50% if it's convenient. Use disk cleanup before defragmenting. Scandisk and defragment will generally run better in Safe Mode.

If that doesn't help it you may want to go to the malware forum and run their checks.

[jforfar]

Thanks for the reply. I have two hard drives: the C is 75% free and the D drive is 33% free. I have run scandisk and defrag. I'll check out the malware. This thing runs so badly that even the few bars of music that accompany Windows on startup are badly broken up.

[Tyger]

How about dusting off the CPU cooler. Heat can cause strange problems.

[GoCompute]

You may need to do a clean install of Windows 98, many computers after prolonged use become corrupt and full of useless programs and malware. Doing a clean install may be your best bet, it worked for me. Remember to back up all programs and if you don't have disks to your hardware, backup your drivers if possible. Use a site like DriverGuide.com to download them if you need them.

After that perform a clean install of Windows 98. If you aren't sure how to, you can use this excellent tutorial right here at Geeks To Go:

Clean Install of Windows 98 Tutorial

[Tyger]

I've run across a few strange things that can slow down computers, one is the Channel screensaver, when it's on a high speed connection it spends a lot of time trying to find the channels. Or the old Quantum bigfoot drives.

One way to reinstall widows without losing anything is to copy and paste the win98 folder from the installation disk to the C: drive and open the setup.exe in the win98 folder. Make sure you have your ProductKey handy. You may already have a win98 folder, or cabs folder in C:.

[GoCompute]

However, if you reinstall Windows the mthod Tyger is talking about you may still have the malware and corrupted files.

[Tyger]

However, if you reinstall Windows the mthod Tyger is talking about you may still have the malware and corrupted files.

Very true, if that is the problem.