Help my antique Thinkpad live a little longer

I have an old 1997 Thinkpad 560 that I take with me on business trips. It has 98, I think the hard drive is under 2 gigs, the RAM is maxed out at 72 megs. I bought it used, so God knows what was ON it. I've had it for 3 years and it's been bulletproof for the most part. Last fall I had the OS reinstalled by a local tech, I don't have an external CD drive and he had to install using floppies. I didn't install Word, etc. I don't have any "extras" on it that I know of, I've tried to keep it down to a bare minimum. I use Juno for an ISP when travelling, but I also have it set up for 2 other ISPs, depending on where I am.

It is old and VERY slow. I've blamed it on Juno's browser for some time, but today I used a "regular" ISP and it wasn't a lot faster. Three or four times during the 1/2 hour net browsing, it froze completely, wouldn't respond to anything. Once it sat for a few minutes, one of the little green lights started flashing madly and it came back to life. On my last trip, last week, I walked away from it for a half hour or so, and the screen was black with just the flashing cursor, which didn't respond, I had to shut it off, then it was okay.

If something major is going bad, then fine, I've gotten my $150 worth. I'll walk away and buy another laptop, one that's a couple years old to keep the cost down a little.

Now my question(s) are: Putting aside any jokes about it's future occupation as door stop, and provided it's not going Tango Uniform on me, what would you do to "minimize" what this little thing has on it's plate? I don't know enough about drivers and startup stuff (like I see in the msconfig interface) to know what I can and cannot shut off.

As stated, I ONLY use this for taking with me so I have net access (email, ebay) at the hotel. I did upgrade to a newer IE last fall so my daughters could use their gmail on it... they couldn't on the old 5.5 Explorer I guess.

What can I "kill off" so that this can live another year or two? I love this little machine, aside from it getting more and more out of date, it truly has been a good little box, subjected to temperature extremes, rough treatment, etc. The former owner had ICQ and the ICQ screen is burned into this screen (thanks!).

It's either milk this one along, find a Thinkpad made in this century, or wait for a Dell sale. Any help will be appreciated.

 

List everything that is in the MSConfig under the startup list and someone can tell you what you don't need!! Atleast this will free up some memory, and it might run a LITTLE faster which could also POSSIBLY eliminate your freezups, being that the computer will not have to fight over the little amount of resources that it does have!!

Roger

 

do a defrag and a reg clean. also clean you ie browser and temp folders

 

Download, install and run these 3.

Cleanup! http://www.stevengould.org/
EmpTemp http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=1575
and CrapCleaner aka CCleaner http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4191

They will really clean out all your crap.

Beware, as the defaults are set, they will clean out all your URL history and you will lose what sites you have recently visited.

If you don't want this to happen, save the URL's to "My Favourites".

I use all 3 every day. Cleans out index.dat files as well.

Defrag after deleting all the crap.

Run Analog X MaxMem http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=307
to get the most out of your memory. I run it a couple of times, one after the other, then close it down as it sometimes conflicts with programs if you leave it going. Bazza

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This is what's in my msconfig:

Yahoo Pager
Scan Registry
IrMon.exe
Iomega startup options
Iomega Drive Icons
Ad User Mon
Deskup
Task Monitor
System Tray
Load Power Profile
Scheduling Agent
AD Service
Load power Profile (I don't know why there's two...)

 

There are always two Load Power Profiles in Windows 9x. Don't worry about it, it's perfectly normal.

Yahoo Pager is not vital, it's up to you if you find it useful. I don't use Yahoo but I think it allows you to send instant messages to other users. It's not vital at startup, and if you want to use it you can always start the program up "manually".

Scan Registry should be left.

IrMon.exe monitors for Infra Red devices like mobile phones etc. It's not vital and again up to you if you think it's useful.

Iomega Startup Options is for Iomega drives and is not vital and up to you.

Ad User Mon I have no idea about, but I would have an educated guess that it's not vital.

Deskup adds Iomega Zip drives icons to the desktop and is not vital.

Task Monitor is generally a Windows app and isn't vital, but double-check the exact path and file name as some spyware can masquerade as it.

System Tray is generally a Windows app and should be left, but again double-check it.

Scheduling Agent may be a Windows app used to schedule tasks at certain times, but again check the path and name in case it's spyware. It's up to you if you find it useful.

AD Service is probably adware, depending on the file name and path, but it's definitely not vital.

If you want to check any names or files, you can do so HERE.


Other useful things you can do are to uninstall any unused programs, and carry out a thorough scandisk and defrag.