Win98SE Explorer running painfully slow

[Chovexani]

Hey guys, I've been having this problem with my Win98SE machine for a long time and can never seem to get it fixed. Whenever I have Explorer open for a few minutes, all of a sudden it gets slow as molasses--subfolders take ages to show their contents, dragging icons around is slower, etc. I've been pulling my hair out for months over this...trying to install the hundreds of mods I have for the Sims and other games literally takes hours longer than it should because Explorer is so GD slow.

I'm a Mac person (iMac is my main machine) and I don't know shit about Windows beyond the basics, so please talk to me like I'm a three year old. :)

Edit: I use Firefox, AntiVir, AdAware/Spybot, etc. so I know it's not virii or spyware that's the problem.

[bemildred]

1. How much memory do you have?

You might be swapping to the hard drive.

[Chovexani]

2. 128MB

It's an older machine.

[bemildred]

3. See if you can shove 1/2 G in there.

Mine is recent with 1/2 G and it still bogs down when I'm playing with music files. There is no guarantee it will fix it, but it's a good idea in any case, and memory is not that expensive these days.

[jayfish]

4. Run Scandisk...

making sure neither of the two check-boxes are ticked. Report back with the results.

Jay

[bemildred]

8. And then defragment the drive. nt

[jayfish]

10. Not Yet.

Doing so may destroy data. if she runs scandisk without attempting to repair, she will get a report of what's going on with the disk. I suspect a bad cluster on the disk is hanging up a process somewhere.

Jay

[bemildred]

11. OK. You are right that you need a clean scandisk before defrag. nt

[hobbit709]

5. 98Se never gets rid of junk files

Even if you delete cookies, history, etc. it still keeps them. It just makes you think they're deleted.

Here's how to do it-takes a little work in DOS
1. Boot up and hit F8 during the initial boot
2. Take the "Command Propmt" option
3. At the "C" prompt, type in SMARTDRV and hit Enter
4. Type CD WINDOWS -Enter
5. Type DELTREE /Y COOKIES- Enter
6. " " " HISTORY- "
7. " " " TEMP - "
8. " " " TEMPOR~1 "
9. When it finishes the last one, reboot into Windows
You'll be amazed at how much crap that removes from your system.
128 Mb should be plenty for 98. My wife runs one with only 64 Mb and just reboots it when it stops.

[Berserker]

6. This is also a good way

to clean out the garbage. Use this program....CrapCleaner
http://www.ccleaner.com/

[bemildred]

9. Yeah, my wife runs with 64M with no trouble.

But she doesn't run games.

[Crazy Guggenheim]

7. Maybe the best thing is to back up the system and do a full

system restore. When was the last time you've done that? And restart in Safe Mode then run the Spyware/Adware detection.

[Chovexani]

12. Thanks for all the suggestions folks

I was out of town for a few days but I will try everything and get back to you. :hi: