At 09:47 AM 5/24/02 -0500, you wrote:
>- the machine has become slow, with incessant hard drive activity.  Short
>   of wiping the hard drive clean and re-installing, what can I do to fix

I did this with a colleague's older computer recently.

-       they had three anti-virus programs running simultaneously
         ONE was too many for this older machine. I uninstalled all but the
         most basic, and got rid of some of the non-essential features such
         as Norton Cleansweep. If the computer is not used on the net,
         and a lot of outside risky files (such as .exe, .doc etc) don't
         get opened, consider going bareback, the AV programs are pretty
         resource-intensive, almost like viruses themselves.

-       they had 130 pieces of spyware and adware present, and a number of
         threads running in the background. I used adaware to kill most of
         these. Gator was one, but there were more. There were also several
         download managers. I uninstalled all of them.

-       there was a miserable program installed by a download manager
         program that I had to figure out how to kill myself- it ran a
         program every time explorer was started- it had modified the
         shell line in the win.ini file. It popped up ads once in a while
         and consumed resources continually.

-       cleaned out the registry

-       moved almost everything out of the startup directory

Norton system information will tell you what processes are running
and *how they were loaded* (registry, bat file, startup, ini file etc).
This is essential for getting rid of them.

Note that upgrading the hard drive can make a big difference if it is a
few years old, and that it may help to set a large fixed swap file size
or even devote a partition to the swap file. More RAM can help, programs
keep getting bigger and bigger, and more RAM generally means less
swapping to disk. 256M - 1G is not unreasonable, depending on what is
being done with the computer, though Win98 will actually run on a 16M
machine, provided you don't run much in the way of programs.

If the machine uses the old 72 pin SIMMs, you should probably toss it
rather than upgrade (it's probably worth less than US$100)

Best regards,

Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..."            "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com
9/11 United we Stand

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