Slow opener

I just added 128MB RAM to my Win98SE machine. It still takes about 90 seconds to boot up completely. At that point I have 86% free space on hard drive. I do notice some windows now open a but quicker than before the memory upgrade. I still have a slot for another 128MB card but with it will it be any faster than with the 188MB RAM I now have? The only things starting at bootup are those windows say are necessary plus my AV softwsare, McAfee Virus Scan On Line.

Am I expecting too much?

 

Dump McAfee, and it will probably be twice as fast.
If you have a NIC in that computer, and are using DHCP, that can account for another lengthy boot delay, but I'll bet it's all due to McAfee.

 

No offense, buy I don't think McAfee is the problem because I have always had this software, in fact it came from H-P with it. I do not have NIC but have Ethernet Adapter and DHCP goes with it.

This slow down has been gradual over the past 4 or 5 months. I have installed and am running Diskeeper 7 for continual defrag.
I think I am looking at a different problem that what you suggest unless the slow decline goes along with your suggestion.

Tests at PC Pitstop show upload speed at 355KBs and download speed sat 655KBs.

 

It's an HP.
Have you disabled, uninstalled all the extra software you don't need? Have you tried it with McAfee uninstalled?
A NIC is your ethernet card, with DHCP it's going to add anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute to startup time.
What things does "windows say are necessary" on bootup?
You only need Explorer, and systray, nothing else, period.
You might like to read this: http://members.cnx.net/reboot/tocache.htm

 

The upload and download speeds I put in my last post were with three windows plus McAfee up and running.
I ran it again with nothing but systray and explorer and the upload speed was the same, the download speed however was 1717 KBs. With McAfee running the download speed dropped to 1695 KBs.
Since I have cable connection I am somewhat leery about opening anything without the AV program running. It and systray and explorer are all that is running at bootup.

What are you suggesting with regard to my cable connection and the ethernet or NIC card?

 

RickyD2 - Reboot is oh so right re: MacAffee. I've seen it just palin cripple machines.

 

Reboot, I've just been reading your (I assume this is yours) "Chache or Not to Cache" and System Monitor is running now. and has been for about 5 minutes. Swap File In Use averaging 1.8M. Unused Physical Memory averaging between 2.0 and 5.4M.

What does this tell us?

 

Yes, that's my article
A swap of 1.8 meg is excellent, very little use at all, however, only having between 2 and 5 meg of free physical ram *****!
With 196 meg (188 for system, the remainder for video?) you should have about 100 meg free. McAfee is probably eating a ton of it.
Consider changing to AVG (free from www.grisoft.com) and see if you can get free RAM up where it belongs.
That number will go down drastically when you start using programs, but should be in the 100 meg area, right after startup.

I would like to see the swap file usage up higher, and free RAM much higher, leaving more for programs.

 

Uninstalled McAfee, Installed AVG.

No programs running except AV, monitor shows 71MB unused memory, 0 swap files in use.

Dont see that bootup is much faster but other windows seem to open quicker.

 

Now that you have AVG, your free RAM is up to 71 meg, from ~5 meg! I'd say that's about a 1400% increase.
Nothing (negligable) swap file use, and sooooo much more free RAM for your programs.
Bootup will still be slow, because of DHCP, and there's very little you can do about it, unless you want to get into setting static IP's for the LAN.
Isn't it nice to know that it's running better/faster, and all because of ONE program?

 

Reboot, I'm impressed. I must confess though, that I am more than just a little nervous now that my only AV is AVG Free. I realize that you get what you pay for and I'll probably upgrade to the pay version
in due time. What do you think?
Sometime soon I will be upgrading to Win XP. Will this AV migrate to XP or does it have to be reinstalled? I saw where it does support XP.

 

Tony T - I appreciate your response, but what are you talking about? You responded to issues not pertinant to my issue, as I see it.

 

Actually that's part of what may be slowing down the boot time.
Try what Tony has suggested, and see.
As for AVG, I really can't say if you'll have to reinstall after upgrading to XP, as I never upgrade, I always do clean installs.
It does work in XP, and will scan over mapped drives as well. I have 5 computers on the LAN, and AVG scans them all, once every 24 hours (at 3 am), and also checks for updates every day too.
I wouldn't worry about it, as AVG does as good (if not better) a job than NAV or any other. Just because it's free, doesn't mean it's not good. If they want people to pay for the support version, then the free one had better be good, or nobody would buy it.

BillyBob and I have both done testing of AVG versus NAV, Avast, PCCillin, and others, and we both feel that AVG is a real winner. It takes up less resources, uses less of a footprint (system hooks in Windows) and catches as much (if not more) than the others.
It's indescribably better than McAfee, easier on the resources than NAV and Avast, and compares equally well with PCCillin, yet it's free, NAV and PCCillin are not.

 

And that is a fact from actuall testing. Not just hear/read say.

Plus AVG is not as Windows/App version dependent either. Same version works with anything 95 thru XP. And that is a fact that I have proven also. I had it in 98 SE. Upgraded to XP over top of SE and AVG is still running with no changes.

McAfee and NAV OVERLOAD the system with UN-NEED trash.

BTW. I USED TO BE a big time Symantec supporter. Those days are now gone. I never did like McAfee.

As to TonyT mentioning removing Client for MS NET, he is absolutley correct. I have to have it as I do have a LAN.

But for testing purposes I have shut it off and decreased the boot up time by at least 30%.

BillyBob

 

Thanks for confirming the "update" thing Bill. Nice to see that it just works, the way it should.
Now if they could get Partition Magic and Nero to do that...

 

There seems to be a pre-occupation with free physical memory.

I have 384Mb RAM and currently 23.2Mb of free physical memory. I do, however, have 184.3Mb used in the disk cache which has a system set minimum of 15.4Mb. Windows has then 192.1Mb at its disposal [184.3 - 15.4 + 23.2] less cached pages in execution above the minimum, if any, before it needs to consider the swap file.

In fact, my swap file usage is zero month in month out. I often see free physical memory drop to zero when Windows will simply start to clear out the disk cache to accommodate memory requests.

Win95 was flawed in this respect but Win98 is a different animal and SE more so.

We should forget free physical memory and think free physical memory + disk cache.

If you have a third party memory manager on board then dump it - this will free up resources and memory - the on board memory manager does a fine job without any interference.

Golden Rule: Forget free physical memory and think free physical memory + disk cache.

 

Ido sincerely thank everyone for their responses and their advice HAS helped immeasurably.

I am, in just a few moiments going to be leaving WinSE forever (I hope) and will be doing clean install of Win XP Home.

I can't wait to see what will happen then.

 

gammaepsilon, my "preoccupation" with free physical memory is ONLY on startup. The more free, the more room for apps, without going to the disk cache (page/swap file), thus faster.
A system that boots with only 10% free RAM is going to be a dog.
A system that boots with 90% free RAM is going to be very fast.
Of course, once it's running, and you're using apps, things are eventually going to slow down, especially in the 9x based OS's.
Ideally, one should have enough RAM so the swap file/disk cache never gets used, or create a ramdrive, and put the cache and temp folders on it.