One of the first things I usually do is run MSINFO32.  Under the tools
menu is the system configuration utility, which has a tab "startup".
 This list contains everything that is started automatically by windows
whether in the registry, ini files, startup folder, etc.

It's easy to remove the check next to many of the programs, and if you
need one to start itself again you can go back and re check it.

You may also want to run system file checker from the tools menu of
MSINFO32.  It'll check all of the windows system files to make sure they
aren't damaged, which has occasionaly caused slow machines for me in the
past.

There are dozens of other things, but two of the biggest speed reducers
in a system are a full hard drive (make sure you have several hundred
megabytes free of HD space for the swap file) and not enough memory.

-Adam

Mike Mansheim wrote:

>Just finished helping my dad with some stuff on his computer, and have a
>couple of basic win98 questions:
>
>- besides the startup folder and the load= and run= lines in win.ini,
>  where do all the things that seem to be running after boot come from?
>  (not on a network - modem access to aol only)
>- 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
>  this? (it has been recently defragged)
>
>I used to know a little about dos and win3.1; unfortunately, I've fallen
>way behind on operating systems - tend to just be a user as I concentrate
>on pic development.
>Here's what's been done so far:
>- as already mentioned, hard drive defragged
>- removed everything from startup folder (there were 5 items in there)
>- checked win.ini - there was nothing on the load= and run= lines
>- deleted a bunch of aol subdirectories (at least 10) that it annoyingly
>  leaves behind when it upgrades.  Don't know why this would make  a
>  difference - there was still 1.6G of 4G total hard drive space avail
>  before this.
>- checked the "performance" section of "system" in control panel.  It
>  said the machine is set up for optimum performance.  This appears to
>  deal only with virtual memory (swapfile in the old days) - it is
>  configured to let windows handle it automatically.
>- checked the bios settings to make sure the processor cache was still
>  enabled - it was.  I saw this once long ago on a different machine -
>  the cache had somehow  been disabled - made a huge difference in the
>  performance of the machine.
>So really, the only thing that has actually been DONE is to remove some
>stuff from the startup folder and delete a bunch of garbage from the hard
>drive.  This made a small difference, but it still isn't right.  Because
>a bunch of stuff was deleted, I said he should defrag again - that hasn't
>been done yet.
>
>Thanks in advance for any suggestions - they would be greatly appreciated.
>
>--
>http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
>ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: The PICList is archived three different
ways.  See http://www.piclist.com/#archives for details.