Okay so I have to say first that deciding to remove a nic no longer used was stupid. When I did I had issues with vxd and had to rebuild. I have done that enoght to have no problems. So I did the complete wipe the hard drive and rebuild. Now when the computer runs it does fine for about 20-30 minutes then starts a skipping freeze. The computer does not stahl and have to be restarted but will skip as you use it. A good example would be the mouse starting/stopping/starting with about a second delay between. It's driving us all nuts. You can then restart the machine and everything works fine for a while again. I thought I would take a shot at replacing the mouse and that did not solve the issue.

The system is old and basically clean. Just an old CD rom, 3.5 floppy, and a USB wireless adapter. Again before I decided to clean up the computer the only performance issue was the wireless connection was at times slow. Makes sense when you see the specs below.

Any help is appreciated.

Win98se
PentIII 650
512 mb memory
6gb hard drive.

Running Netscape 7.2
All Windows Updates have been installed and running.
Norton Internet Security 2004

This might initially sound like an odd solution but, if it's a performance problem, you might be better of actually removing some of the memory. Windows 98SE was never designed to manage as much as 512Mb RAM - it runs best on 128Mb in most cases, though I've had Windows 98SE PCs running up to 256Mb when there were very memory-intensive applications installed such as AutoCAD. Remember that Windows 98SE is essentially an update of Windows 95 technology, which was released over 10 years ago when the minimum spec to run it was a 66MHz 486 processor and 16Mb RAM !!

I'm assuming that you're not getting any specific error messages?

If reducing the memory doesn't help, try uninstalling the USB wireless adaptor and see if it then runs OK.

Let us know if that helps or if you need further advice

I purchased a new wireless adapter for the pci slot and did away with the USB version. Immediate improvbement. No more probelems with the computer. I should have known that using an old machine with a USB 1.0 setup would have been a bad idea in today's world.
Thanks for the help.

Originally Posted by DJNafey

This might initially sound like an odd solution but, if it's a performance problem, you might be better of actually removing some of the memory. Windows 98SE was never designed to manage as much as 512Mb RAM - it runs best on 128Mb in most cases, though I've had Windows 98SE PCs running up to 256Mb when there were very memory-intensive applications installed such as AutoCAD. Remember that Windows 98SE is essentially an update of Windows 95 technology, which was released over 10 years ago when the minimum spec to run it was a 66MHz 486 processor and 16Mb RAM !!

I'm assuming that you're not getting any specific error messages?

If reducing the memory doesn't help, try uninstalling the USB wireless adaptor and see if it then runs OK.

Let us know if that helps or if you need further advice