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Thread ID: 5514	2000-08-30 07:37:00	win98 stability!?	Guest (0)	Press F1

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6094	2000-08-30 07:37:00	Stability with Win98? No such thing I know, but if anyone is having trouble keeping Win98 alive without having to reinstall all the time I would like to offer a little advice. Now I know that Win98 isn't great by any stretch of the imagination, but it is possible for it to run reasonably well fro a long period of time. I'm probably asking for trouble saying this but my installation of Win98 has just clocked up two years and it still seems to be going alright, by doing the following. 1)Set up a system partition and ghost it. Absolutely essential these days as we keep adding programs to see if they're going to be what we want. Set up the windows partition big enough to hold all your program files and set aside another drive or partition of the same size for a ghost. I know this may seem like a waste of a couple of gig if you're short on space but it really is worth it! 2)Install from a fresh format and setup all your printers, modems and drivers etc before adding any programs to the system. 3)Defrag your harddrive after every major program install (ie office, corel draw etc). Try it and you'll be surprised just how messy it is after each program gets added to your drive. 3)Keep your data separate from your system. That C:/My Documents thing is really scary. If you do use this folder due to it's convenience I suggest backing up your data automatically onto another partition/drive almost every time it changes. Better to be safe than sorry. 4)Don't experiment with programs! Sorry but Win98 is touchy at the best of times, but I'm a firm believer in the theory that it is common for a third party company to build a product that doesn't interface with Win98 correctly. There's so many different people and departments in Microsoft even they can't get it right, so it takes a really switched on company from the outside to put products together that don't stuff your windows installation. Another reason why ghosting is important. Try the program for a while and if it's no good uninstall and wait and see if your machine does anything weird from there on in. Reghost if needed. As most of the software we all use on a daily basis is a known quantity, try to stick with it and let someone else try the new stuff first! 5)Get lots of RAM. Everyone knows this already, but more than 64Meg is great when it comes to stopping those nasty blue screens when you get impatient and try to drive too many applications at one time. 6)If anything's changed, give it a couple of weeks and if the system is running well clean out your files ('Disk Cleanup' then check the July/August? PC World for a list of other files you can safely remove), scan disk, defrag and reghost. 7)Reboot the machine daily. If you do leave it on overnight dragging MP3's off the net I find it good to reboot the machine in the morning. 8)Use caution when applying all those lovely little programs that promise to defrag faster, clean up your system, speed up the internet etc etc. Again all these third party products have been written for an operating system that isn't even that openly available to them, or they themselves are dodgy! Stick to the advice of PC World and trusted friends who have used the products for at least a month and haven't had their system go all hot and bothered on them. 9)Run a good virus program (or at least scan with it before you reghost the system) and a firewall (blackice or zonealarm). You've pretty much got to nowadays! Good luck:) Gareith	Guest (0)
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