Rather old laptop

[Redhat]

A client has passed on his daughter's "laptop". It's an ancient Compaq, running Win98SE. I've been asked to "speed it up". First, I've took off PcCillin which was slowing it down quite a bit, and shall replace it with AVG which is a bit less resource-hungry (in my experience) than PCC. I'm now defragmentating, but the thing is I haven't used 98 for a number of years, and feel I need to ask for others' opinions regarding other ways of speeding it up rather than defrag and software memory management. Are there any tips/tricks I should know?

Cheers,

Matt

[homecomputeraid]

The things I've found that affect speed the most are programs running at startup. Go through Add/Remove Programs and get rid of anything that doesn't look needed (I usually complete this step with the user standing over my shoulder making sure I don't remove something they like.) You can also go to Start, Run, and open msconfig. Look for things that can be kept from running at startup there. If you find stuff in there, it's best to try and keep it from running by going into the actual software and setting it to keep from running at startup.

Delete any temp files by searching for *.tmp. You could also run Disk Cleanup (Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Cleanup). I've found that some temp files aren't deleted with it, so I usually do a manual search too. I often look for ~*.* and delete those too, as they're almost always temporary files.

Delete extra IE junk by going to Tools, Internet Options, then hitting Delete Cookies, Delete Files and Clear History. I also change the size of the Temporary Internet files folder by clicking on Settings, and turning it down to 10 mb.

After all that, you could defrag.

You could also ask for a HijackThis checkup to make sure it doesn't have any spyware!

Hope this helps.