Sudden system slow down

Hi
Firstly I'd like to say thanks to all the people that contribute to this forum. I've learnt alot from you all.

And now my problem / situation

Over the past few days one of the computers in our house has slowed down by a huge amount. If you wish to have 2 Internet Explorer windows open, and a couple of msn messaging windows everything runs SO SO slow, And if your unlucky the users will get a blue screen saying that the computer is low on system resources and then the machine will restart.

So, now your going to say, Well.. Your low on system resources, go to your store :p but this doesnt seem to be the case at all. Apparently, According to system information the machine has 73% system resources free, but when its in this condition it feels like the computer hasnt been restarted for at least 2 months! Everything runs very slow, If your browsing the internet and wish to scroll down the page, when it scrolls down, the previous part of the page lags on the screen for a few seconds, its a very jurkey motion.

Now, If I remember rightly my XP machine behaved like this (just the webpage part) when my graphic card drivers wasnt installed... And my brother was saying that the only thing he has changed recently is that he has updated the graphic card drivers, because one of his new games wouldnt worked without the update.

I've virus scanned that machine, and it appears to be clean. At the moment the machine is defragging, which i doubt will help much at all, but other than this i'm unsure of what I can do. I've checked the system information to make sure some RAM hasnt fallen out or anything, but it all seems okay.

Could anyone give me any suggestions on what could be causing the problem, and a possible fix for it.

Thanks :)
All help will be appreciated.

Bellow are the systems stats:
OS: Windows 98se
Hard drive: 40gig (7gig in use)
Prossessor: AMD Atherlon 800mhz
RAM: 384mb
Graphic card: Voodoo 4500 (new drivers from http://www.voodoofiles.com )

Thanks Again

- Xeron

I would uninstall the new drivers, and put the old ones back in, to see if they( the new ones) were the problem.

Quote:

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Now, If I remember rightly my XP machine behaved like this (just the webpage part) when my graphic card drivers wasnt installed... And my brother was saying that the only thing he has changed recently is that he has updated the graphic card drivers, because one of his new games wouldnt worked without the update.

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A graphic card driver will do that if it is not compatible with something. Am guessing that the new driver and win98se don't like each other. Now that's just a guess based on what you are saying.

What you could do is read up on the driver and figure out if there was any issue with it and win98se. I will look into it some more and see if I come up with an exact solution.

I hope this helps.

Guidance...

Humm..how much hard drive is left on the sstme partition ? when was the last time you rebooted?

Graphic card drivers are a pain. I have had several problems with them. Make sure the *new drivers you got are actually compatible with 98se and not only XP or up to 95. And also make sure that they are compatible with the rest of the hardware in the box. Graphic card drivers can/will cause the system to slow down to a crawl.

Well you are attempting to defrag the Hd witch is one of the first things I would do and then After that I would run disk clean up that will delete any temp files that Windows uses. and it should speed up the Hd a bit Hope that helps

Correct me if I am wrong, but defragging shouldn't help that much as most of the pages used by IE are stored in RAM when they're on screen. It will help to get IE starting faster, as it arranges the files in a more logical way (sorry to patronise, but I don't know how much you know about defrag). Check to see how much space you've got left on the HDD. I remember I had the exact same problem when my machine used all but 300kb on my HDD. Could it have been that your brother used up all the space with his game?

Just another angle as opposed to the graphics card.

da'dodo had you not noticed or read carefully enough to see that Xeron mentioned how much space was used on the HD.

Also the IE problem was associated with another pc and not the current one, in which he mentions the entire pc is slow.

I just thought I would point that out, since other people reading your post may not like your quick post without adhering to detail.

Guidance...

Hi,
Thanks for the speedy replies. Bballand the computer get switched off every night, and at the current time holding a 6 hour uptime is a hard task with the blue screens.
I’ve recently noticed that although in the system information it states that I have 73% of the system resources free, the system monitor has informed me that my memory usage is Usage: 379/384MB.

Unfortunately I don’t have access to the original driver that the moment, So I’m just about to install version 4.12.01.0666 from http://eqlive.station.sony.com/suppo...t/ts_video.jsp

If this fails to solve the problem I’ll have to track down the original driver. (I can get it just not so easy at the moment).

In the mean time if anyone else has any other suggestions, it all helps, And if anyone feels that there is a better driver out their than the one listed, please do speak up.
Thanks

-Xeron

THere could be a system leek some wer......... did the kid install anything else on that PC.... a game a prog.... or a drive..... ::coz this hapend to me when I installed XP on my Pc my Zip drive coused a huge leak 100Mb.. of ram.. & i didnt use it... so I took it out the PC runs gr8 now.... look if nothing... works....... Format that Pc.... but back up everything u need.....

It is probably a red herring, but just check to see if you have any of these files on your system:

svcinit.exe (should be in windows\system\)
web.exe (normally in c:\)
tapicfg.exe (also in c:\)


Cheers

EDIT: You say that you have scanned for viruses. Did you do that in safe mode? also you should Get AdAware 6 from lavasoft, and Spybot Search & Destroy, update them and run them in safe mode.

It sounds like your video card drivers I must admit, but adware and spyware can create memory leaks. So I think we should eliminate that possibility first?