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General discussion

How do you tell?

Dec 12, 2003 4:13PM PST

How do you tell whats causing a specific problem? sometimes when I click on an icon on the desktop or system tray or quick launch, the program will not startup, if I delete that program icon shortcut and make a new one it will work again for awhile, but then it will stop responding again. The system seems to be running a bit slower than usual also, I have defragged a few times but still have these probs. I'm running an old AMD K62 500 with Win 98 SE, what would cause this? Hard drive going bad, memory going bad, processor going bad? or something else? how do you tell?

Thanks, any help is appreciated...

Discussion is locked

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Re:How do you tell?
Dec 12, 2003 9:02PM PST

To me, that sounds a lot more like either old fashioned operating system corruption (a sad fact of life with Windows, especially the 9x/Me series), or possibly a virus.

Assuming you have an up to date virus scanner and it hasn't detected anything, then you're looking at reformatting and reinstalling everything if you want to fix the problem.

And as for how it is you tell these sorts of things. Experience is the only real teacher. I think most of the experts here are in the same boat as me, and at some point were completely clueless about computers. We broke things quite regularly, and learned by fixing the things we broke. Do it long enough, and you start to figure out what sort of symptoms are typical of what problem, and possible solutions to the problem.

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Windows 98 is not maintenance free.
Dec 12, 2003 9:51PM PST

One of the laments of PCs is they require the owner to perform maintenance such as running DISK CLEANUP or learn ARCANE MEMORY OPTIMIZING such as you can read in the article Optimizing Windows at http://www.aumha.org/articles.htm

In short, nothing seems to be amiss. Just that you may be expecting the machine to work without maintenance.

Bob

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Tinanae, To Get You Started....
Dec 13, 2003 3:54AM PST
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Re:How do you tell?
Dec 13, 2003 9:47AM PST

I had a similar problem some time back. I jumped in and changed this amd that before I realized after awhile the "mouse" itself had a flaky button. It was intermit and such and basically the real cure was to replace mouse. The cure just wasn't immediate it would seem to work and then not and yes, re-installed several pgms. and/or setting seemed to make things work when really the "final act" of the mouse clicking properly was the end of the long chain of events that made what to appear work. Boy, that took awhile to sink in. Sad -----Willy

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Re:Re:How do you tell?
Dec 14, 2003 2:14PM PST

Thanx for all the help so far, though i've tried all the "cleaning up and defragging" and the os is not a very old install so I dont think I need to format and reinstall just yet. I have yet to put ad-aware on that particular machine, I have it on my other two computers for cleaning up all the junk that gets put on from browsing and stuff. I will install it on that machine and see if it helps at all...
thanx again...