Windows Me Problem

HP Vectra VLi8, PIII Processor 64Mb RAM,

The system started to run slow, so I checked for Spyware and Viruses as described on Major Geeks but found nothing. Scandisk ran ok, no bad sectors or anything there, so I decided to run defrag. It hung.

Disabled eveything in the startup folder under msconfig and it flew through defrag with no problems.
Started enabling startup items one at a time and running defrag til it hung on something. I then unchecked the last item thinking it would procedd with no problems as it had before. Wrong, it hung again.

I assumed that if stopping the startup items cured the problem then something in startup must be causing it. But theres nothing really there, SpySweeper and AVG are the only non standard products on the PC and it defrags fine with SpySweeper and I encountered problems before ever getting to the AVG startup.

Any ideas what could be causing the problem or how to troubleshoot it more effectively?

 

My guess is he's using windows ME based on the title of his post. Although, a more suitable statement may be "windows ME = problem"

My thought would be that you could use more ram. Are you on high speed internet? Minimum suggested is 256mb for high speed. I'm sure 64mb is enough for the OS, but other apps might be going over that 64 and just slowing you down. Have you recently installed any apps that run in the background? Also, has it always run a little slow and now it's just unbearably slow?

Finally, try downloading a trial of PerfectDisc7. It's a great defrag program. It's made a world of difference on my computer. You can get it at http://www.majorgeeks.com/download268.html

 

Where it hangs seems completely random, and not being able to defrag is not a huge concern but i use it as a good yardstick for how well things are running. After all if you cant defrag then somethings normally up. Especially as Me has no sfc program to run.

I normally run defrag and scandisk in safe mode to avoid all the intterruptions but with this particular machine you get no POST screen and pressing f8 just gets you a prompt asking what you want to boot from.