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RM, here are a couple of things to check. First, right click on My Computer and go to Properties. On the Performance tab, click File System. On the Hard Disk tab, change the setting you want to use in the Typical Role Of This Computer to Network Server (this forces Windows to use memory more efficiently). Click on the Advanced tab (if I remember ME correctly) and check your System Resources. It should be somewhere around 90% in a well tuned system. Of course it's not, so do the following. Go to Start>Run and type in "msconfig" without the quotes and click on OK. Go to the Startup tab and uncheck all of the items that don't need to load at startup. Anything by AOL, any instant messengers, MSOffice, etc. does not need to load at startup (if you have questions about the items that are in there email them to me in a list and I can tell you what is safe to uncheck and what is not). Now, this does not mean that these items are gone, it simply means that we are not going to allow them to load portions of themselves into memory when the computer boots up. Close this screen and reboot the computer. When it reboots it will give you an informational box telling you that it is in a diagnostic startup mode. Check the box that says "don't show this message again" and click OK. Now go back and check your system resources like we did above. Better? Ok, we are not done yet. Next go to Start>Accessories>System Tools>Scandisk. Run a thourgh Scandisk on drive C and make sure Automatically Fix Errors is checked. This could take a while... Once Scandisk is done, reboot the computer. As it is booting, start tapping on the F5 key to put the computer into Safe Mode. Tap about twice a second. Once you see the message that Windows is bypassing the startup files you can stop tapping on the F5 key. Once Windows has booted into safe mode, disable your screen saver and then go to Start>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Defragmenter. Start the Defragmenter for Drive C. Fair warning-if you have not run this for a while it could take up to a few hours. We started the system in safe mode and disabled the screen saver to make certain that nothing will interfere with the Defragmenter as it rearranges files. Once it is complete, restart the computer normally and it should be somewhat speedier than it was before. Now-once a month run the Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter like above and it will keep your system running better. This will work on Windows 98 and ME, but does not apply to Windows 2000 or XP.
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