OK, so your hard drive has plenty of breathing room.

40 processes sounds like a lot for your basic desktop machine I'd still like to see the list if possible; does PRCView have any facilty for printing the list or saving it to a text file? I use Norton's Process Viewer, so I'm not familiar with PRCView.

In the process viewer, can you see any processes running which seem to be taking up an inordinate amout of CPU time or other system resources?

there are a few reasons for this.
A) program is eating up all you cpu time... and is not allowing other threads to processes the IRQ's, or a program with a thread priority set to HIGH.

B) too many programs running, not enuf ram

C) Hardware conflict.

most of the time I see this with older slower computers that have fragmented drivers and are reading and writing alot of data (swapfiles). keep in mind... Also the speed of the drive contributes to this factor as well as well as the transfer mode. DMA or PIO. PIO mode usaly is slower and consumes massive amounts of CPU time when transfering large files.

even though you defraged (in win 98).... windows sytem files are not moved. meaning any file windows needs to load does not get moved. so if they are scattered... (when defraging they are the white blocks with a red slash going thru them... if I remmber right...)

also, win 95 and win98 are NOT stable over long periods of time... after 2 days of uptime, I noticed system responsiveness degrading... (reboot is your only solution)


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to me it sounds like your hardrive is possibly a little slugish (20GB @ RPM???), mixed with possibly low mem... and lots of programs running. now you said you had NAV running... Believe it or not, running virus scan with real time protection takes a toll on the system. The AV will want to scan EVERY file before opening. On some selecting a file will trigger a scan as well. I would suggest disabling AV and see if you gain a performance boost, if not, check your memory usage... drop down to a dos prompt and type in MEM and see what % is used. furthermore, check to make sure you drive is running in DMA mode. (win 95/98... never used me) select my computer > properties > device manager > find the hard disk controler > properties > (look thru the tabs and see if the check box "DMA enabled" is checked (its been about 2 years since I used 9x). if none of these are the problem... it could very well be some spyware or a virus that is propergating in the background...

keep in mind... during cpu idle, the hard drive should not be accessed that often.... so if your hdd light is flashing pretty quick, and your not doing anything, a red flag should go up... find out what is accessing your drive!!!!

a good program for this is filemon... look around on google for it... its a great program.

The PRCViewer can save to a text file. I am attaching.

I just found an easier to read version on Adaware. File is attached.