Page 1 of Am I Flogging a Dead Horse?
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My 7-year old PC (P-II 500 MHZ, 128 MB RAM, Win 98 ) is used mainly for surfing the net, creating the usual MS Office documents, and downloading pictures from a digital camera.
It has 2 Hard disks - one with 4 GB where program files are stored (75% full), and a 20 GB which is used to store data files.
Of late, it has begun to freeze for a couple of seconds at a time, and has generally slowed down.
I doubled the RAM to 256K, and the Windows Resource Manager shows 56% free. However, this occasional freezing is still there, and there is no appreciable improvement in speed.

Should I accept the inevitable, and buy a new PC? I will do so anyway, but would want the kids to have the old one for schoolwork, etc. provided I can make it speed up like it used to be.

Some people say I should overwrite Win 98 (don`t know the technical term) which would iron out many bugs. Others say I should re-format the 4 GB disk.

What are my options?

Cheers

Tarzan

This item was edited on Wednesday, 4th January 2006, 17:00

Bloody hell! Seven Years!

I find that every couple of years, I have to reformat my System Drive and do a clean reinstall of Windoze, just to get rid of the junk that has built up through months of surfing, as well as getting a nice clean registry to begin screwing up again. :p

If you do go down that route, make sure you have everything backed up and all the software installation discs first. It`s worth making a plan beforehand, so you don`t worry about losing your IE favourites or your document templates, Outlook pst files, and half a dozen other essentials, that get stored with Windoze.

===========================
Jitendar Canth

Quote:
"I thought what I`d do was, I`d pretend I was one of those deaf-mutes."

My Top 20 movies at YMDB
Site Reviewer at DVD Reviewer

I go through the same hting now and again, I have a PII 450. I`ve now got a bigger hard drives in in, and a dvd writer, but apart from that it`s the same PC I bought in Jan 99.

I don`t re-install Windows that often, but I would say that should bring new life into your PC. I find mine is adequate for surfing the internet, email word processing, i.e. the same things I could do on it when I bought it. I now use Windows 2000 rather than 95 though.

As Jitendar says above make sure you have CDs with your favourites, email etc, and you`ll be fine.

And shouldn`t this be in the PCs forum?

Al

www.admars.co.uk

This item was edited on Thursday, 5th January 2006, 07:27

Thanks, Jitendar and Al - will take up your suggestions soon.
This should be in PCs & Mobiles - somehow got posted here.

I`ll repost this.

Cheers

Tarzan