Win 98 system performance

[RootExposure]

I noticed my computer has been hanging alot lately. I looked to see my hard drive was and there was 10 gigs of free space so i figured that wasn't the problem. I also ran scan disk, disk cleanup, and the defrager. I looked into system performance and I noticed sysytem resources was down to 48%. I realize that's very low and whatever is taking up all the resources is the cause of the hanging and freezing, but i don't know how to find out what exactly is causing this problem. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Chris

[Force Flow]

Do you have a lot of progs running in the background? Check your system tray.

Start > run > type "msconfig" > "startup" tab

Uncheck progs thta youdon't want to load at startup.

[RootExposure]

There are alot of things checked msconfig. I had unchecked alot of them but there are quite a few I'm not sure what they do so i haven't unchecked them. There are very few programs in the system tray.
Is it possible that Norton could be the problem? I was trying what i have done recently and i remembered that my father had loaded norton onto the computer a few months ago. Other than that I have no idea. As I have said I unchecked the majority of programs that open at startup. Thanks

Chris

[Cricket]

Hit Ctrl Alt Del and it'll show you all the stuff running on your computer.

You can go to Start> Run> and type in "msconfig" and go to the Startup tab. There you can uncheck anything you don't want to start up with Windows.

Have you been cleaning out the temp folders on a regular basis?

Cricket

[Force Flow]

C:\windows\temp
C:\windows\temporary internet files
C:\windows\cookies

[edit]: You can usually follow the address sources to find out what prog is on the startup list.

[Cricket]

Is that Norton System Works? Are all the utilities starting up with Windows and running in background? I'd turn them all off.

Here's a site you can check out to see what all those programs listed in msconfig are: Start-up Application List.

Cricket

[RootExposure]

Thanks for the link. I found that gator was running on my computer. When i stopped that from being part of the startup the system resources have gone up to 75% with no programs open (other than the ones in system tray). I vaguely remember that it should be 75% and above but I'm not sure how high should it be when you first startup? Thanks for all the help

[newme]

you should run spybot it will clean out all your spyware lurking in your computer

[Cricket]

Originally posted by RootExposure Thanks for the link. I found that gator was running on my computer. When i stopped that from being part of the startup the system resources have gone up to 75% with no programs open (other than the ones in system tray). I vaguely remember that it should be 75% and above but I'm not sure how high should it be when you first startup? Thanks for all the help

The amount of free system resources your system has differs from PC to PC...it all depends on what your system has running in background at the time. I run Win98SE on this computer and at startup it has 92% free system resources with only AVG and the resource meter running. After getting online and starting up some applications, it's down to 59% free system resources right now with about 11 processes running.

I'd get a spyware/malware scanner like Spybot Search & Destroy or Ad Adware 6 and check your system out. Scan for trojans and viruses and clean out your temp folders.

Cricket

[TwoRails]

Just for comparison, I'm down to 45% right now, and no performance problems. I've been fired up for about 5 hours and have done a lot of work, such as being online (with all associated programs running like AV and firewall), doing the checkbook, watching movies, editing graphics, etc., etc.

TwoRails