Starting Performance Troubleshooting

A friend gave me an old 200MHz Pentium 2 W98 (vanilla) 128MB PC that was used primarily on an office network. It ran much slower than an old 100MHz PC I used to have.

So I deleted a lot of network drive definitions, a lot of apps, and a lot of user-specific information. The registry looked like it was full of irrelevant info so I also ran a registry-cleaning program, but it still runs slow.

And when I installed a large office software suite, it told me several times that I was extremely low on RAM. I shut absolutely everything else down. It even seemed to help when I cleaned the quickstart icons from the taskbar. During boot, the W98 splash screen displays for an awful long time too. Don't know what this machine is doing to keep itself busy.

I realize that this is a loaded question, but what would be a good place to start diagnosing the source of the problem?
Thanks, Gary

 

"low on RAM "?

I would think knowing exactly how much ram you have would be a good place to start.

*Click on the Taskbar Startbutton
*scroll to and click on "Run "
*Type on the runline msinfo32
*The first category or the top of the tree is "System information "
*on the right of that is your specs for memory
*How much Ram you got in this puppy?
*What's your free resources amount?
*What's your free hardisk amount "

While you here (msinfo32) click on the "Software Tab" and then "Running Tasks ". What cha' got?

Again from the win98_Taskbar_startbutton>run_line
*type msconfig
*click on the startup tab
*what cha' got loading at bootup and running in the background?


==========
There is a ton of stuff in the archives of past posts

*for disabling the windows logo so you can what's going on behind the cloud.

*doing routine cleanups such as windows and IE temps

*reducing startup apps

*Windows bog

*Slow startup

*Adaware Spybot and a good updated virus scan cleanup

*deleteing swapfile

*deleting shelliconcache

*Running scandisk "thorough" (bad sectors or sectors detected as possibly going bad on harddrives can cause extremely slow memory sector read/writes)

*Running dosmode scanreg /fix /opt

*Running Defrag

*A safemode check for duplicate or ghost devices in "Device Manager ".

*make sure you have checked both "software and hardware" for updates and patches and again both from Microsoft updates and any OEM's.

Etc etc just for a few ideas.