A friend's PC which is in dire need of an upgrade and re-install of the OS (Win98) needs help. He's installed/de-installed various apps/games over the past 2 years and now suffers abysmal startup times and pagefile thrashing due to low physical memory available despite having 392MB RAM.

Although he has a ghost image of the C drive it's way too out of date to be worthwhile loading and the hassle of a re-format/re-install on the current hardware cannot be justified - the box will be radically upgraded within the next 2-4 months (cash permitting).

What he needs now is a cheap short term fix.
We have run Cleansweep and apart from some HDD space have not gained much. He owns Norton Utils but had to de-install it due to a problem with a Kingpin Anti-cheat checker giving false reports. It could go back on temporarily if there's a good chance it could assist(?).

Can anyone suggest any free(ish) tools available that might help analyse/diagnose his problems short term, the Win98 task manager is less than helpful?

Dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Assuming, of course, that you've already run LavaSoftUSA's "Ad Aware", that you've already run MSCONFIG.EXE and cleaned any extra crap out of the startup group, the run lines in the registry, etc., and that you've already done a complete virus scan. At that point, it becomes just one of those things where you just need to reinstall Windows once in a while. In that case, the Corporal Hicks method is the only answer.

"Corporal hicks?! But he's just a grunt!

Uh, no offense..."

"None taken."

I would run a Defrag and ScanDisk before I wiped that drive and reinstalled all those apps. In my experience with installing/uninstalling lots of apps, it has had a profound effect on well, overall speed no matter what it's doing.

Depends on the system. I don't think I've defragged my system in years, and yet it's working fine.

I'm one of the few people I know who's been able to keep his Win98 box running stable without a reinstall since 1998. And that's the original retail release, too, not even OSR2.

Dust off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure
- "it's the only way to be sure".

I know, (this and your other post are) all good common sense suggestions BUT he doesn't have the technical know-how to survive the orbital nuke without accepting planetary re-inforcements and is a lone marine right now.

The subject is slated for recovery by United Systems Military for resurrection project later in the autumn but re-inforcements are required NOW.

Good shout but he's all de-fragged. It really smells like a lack of memory but he has plenty (for his needs) so my bets go on orphaned apps (or part of) wasting RAM etc.

Is "Registry:Run=" the only candidate for memory wasteage here? We've gone through that already and didn't find much worth removing.

Perhaps though the Weyland Yutani Colonial Administration designed the system to work this way?

i love these questions. i messed up my install of winXP pro and nothing was running right after fudged the registry but i got to thinkin...what if i re-installed without re-installing?confused? don't be. if you can use a dos prompt, you can do what i did and what my brother has done with his win 98 install.

basically what i did was transplant in a new fresh registry. i went into dos usind a win98 boot disk and deleted c:\windows. then i restarted the computer and the XP disc automatically booted into an OS install and re-installed windows. since your using 98, you have to start the install from the command line. all my data was there as i left it and i then had sweet running virgin registry. the only catch is that some programs will have to be re-installed but you'd be surprised that many programs don't need a re-install to run properly!

if you do this, move any personal and non-OS dependant files anywhere in the windows directory to a different folder outside the windows folder.

by the way, IMO - cleansweep is garbage barley worth the install. does nothing but take up space on the hard drive.

note to all:
if you are an NT/2000/XP user that wants a VERY EASY and usefull registry backup utility, i use ERUNT. whenever i want to 'try' out software without risking it leaving junk behind after an un-install, i run this baby and backup up the hives. when i want to restore - it's just a double-click and reboot away. it's such a simple program to use too! keep in mind that it backs up the registy only. you have to delete whatever files those un-installed programs leave behind but its better than useless registry keys lying around.

get ERUNT here > http://home.t-online.de/home/lars.hederer/erunt