I am in thinking about reformating my hard drive and reinstall windows 98 second edition because i thinks its too slow from all the applications i installed that messed up my registry (i suspect that is the cause). Even though i got about 512mb of ram and am running a P3 700 megahertz computer, and have a 80 gig maxtor hard drive, it really laggs.

Does anyone might know of why its so slow, particularly why my music folder takes so long to open, even when i do not multitask? i notice that i would have to restart my computer to make opening folders fast again but then after a few openings of folders, it again is slow to open. also when i multitask, the computer laggs and i have to wait for it to catch up.

so i'm thinking about installing another clean (refurbished western digital) hard drive and using the old one as a backup. (side question, what is a more reliable brand, maxtor or WD? What HD brand is the best?)

What do you guys reccomend for my system, windows 98 or 2000?

Also is there any special files i have to backup to make my riocar and emplode to recognize my new "my music" folder?

any comments would be appreciated, thanks -Toan

You could have something causing a memory leak or it could, like you said, be caused by registry corruption. Try ctrl alt del to find out what is running that you can stop. Or run msinfo32 to find out all of the software programs that are running at any given time. Or run msconfig to check your startup programs, config.sys, autoexe.bat, system.ini and win.ini to see if you can find anything out of place.

I run 98SE but if I had a copy of 2000 I would go with that. I did a fresh install not too long ago and it made mine speed up.

As for the question about the hard drives, both wd and maxtor are good drives I have had four maxtors one 8.4 gig a 1.3gig and two 20gigs and they all still work fine I have a couple old wd and they still work fine too. Just be shure you get one with the fastest rpm you can find.

Do you have the option enabled that shows Explorer folders as web pages? You know, with the left-hand column showing stuff?

That's one of the first things that gets killed on my sytems, including any "folder.htt" files on my hard disk. That crap always slows down the opening of web pages.

It could be just that it's trying to read the data associated with the files' tags and trying to display it in the left-hand column or something.

I read somewhere just yesterday that there is a problem with win98/ME etc regarding slow access of folders! Apparently in 2000/XP its OK. You might want to bear this in mind.

thanks tony. that seemed to make it faster. but i am not happy about getting a lot of missed frames from my digital capture card when i try to capture from my digital camera so i am guessing it is a motherboard/system resource/registry problem. my motherboard does not accept ultra dma hard drives and so that can be another problem. so i will get a new one.

can anyone recommend me a good quality hassle free/no compatiblelity problems motherboard? i'm also thinking about going scsi to free up more system resources. is this true? thanks!