Information wrote:
My Presario 1250 laptop is - for lack of a more technical word - lazy.
The response time to keyboard and mouse events is sometimes perfectly
good, and sometimes horrible. I put the cursor over "File" in some
arbitrary program, and the click button appears, but sometimes, there
is no response for up to several seconds. While I am typing text
into a word processor, the text stops appearing for a few seconds,
then catches up with what I typed.

What is characteristic of these 'lazy' events is that just before the
response finally happens, I hear a noise that I interpret as the hard
drive spinning up.

I haven't really any good notion as to how to go about analyzing the
problem, but I wonder if anyone has any notion of what might be
happening. I have Computer Associates EZ-Antivirus; Zone Alarm
Firewall; Spybot Search & Destroy; Ad-Aware.

Running Windows 98 4.10.1998 - the version of Windows that came with
the computer.

Thanks for any help

Eanruig

Win98, sad to say, needs a periodic fresh installation. Barring that,
you can do a few things that will likely help. First, run Disk Cleanup
and particularly make sure that the Windows/temp directory is empty.
From Start/Run type: msconfig[enter] and select the Startup tab. Review
each entry listed ( the exe and dll files) against this site and
determine if these should be running or not:
http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_content.php Either uncheck the
box for those that should not run; or, better, open the application and
from its options menu disable start when Windows starts. Check that you
have at least 300-400MB free disk space for Windows. Then run the Disk
Defragmenter. If you haven't defragged recently, this will take some
time to complete.

Q