hi everyone.
Do I have a virus if my hard drive keeps churning after I boot up?
All programs running normally albeit slowly. Churning just started
happening one or two months ago. 7 year old machine. New one year
old Western D. hard drive. Norton virus scan is negative.
What is the cure? Tom Williams
Win98
Packard Bell Pentium
48 meg ram
1. I think you're probably running out of memory and Win98 is using
the swap disk on your HD to supplement it. Win98 does a lot better
with a minimum of 64 MB RAM and you only have 48 (128 is even better).
IIRC the OS in W98 already uses about 32 MBs; which doesn't leave much
for anything else if all you have is 48 total. Hence the OS will out
source the RAM requirement overflow to the HD (i.e. swap disc). Also
important, is that the OS will dynamically expand and contract the
size of the swap disc on the fly. This constant monitoring of the swap
disc size is also a tremendous waste of your already limited
resources. This may not have been noticeable until you put in some
final straw two months ago (i.e. another program that required memory
resources) and made it more noticeable.
Suggestions: Get more RAM. You'll pay about twice a much for SDRAM as
you would for the present day DDR. And the old fashion SIMM drams are
probably worth their weight in gold. You can't find them, and if you
do, you'll pay plenty for them since no one makes them in volume
anymore and hardly anyone carries them. Another thing is to set your
virtual memory's minimum and maximum swap file size to be the same
number of MBs. This prevents the OS from constantly expanding and
contracting the swap disc. Go into my computer > properties > and look
for performance and virtual memory. The minimum-maximum settings are
usually a very small number and a very large number on most probably
your drive "C:\." Change both those numbers so that they are identical
and is equal to about 2.5 times your actual physical RAM (ie. 48 x 2.5
= 120 [or just 128 to round it off]). This locks the swap disc size
and prevents windows from using resources to constantly monitor and
manage it.
2. Another possibility is impending HD failure. HDs that suddenly make
a lot of noise is signaling that it is about to go bust. How soon it
happens is anyone's guess. Usually, if you hear lots of "clicking"
noises in addition to the normal disk access rattling, the your drive
is toast. You should get a new drive immediately and transfer any
critical data. Since you didn't mention any data corruption (which
often accompanies this) I'm assuming that isn't the case but it was
worth mentioning none the less.
Final suggestion: Retire the dog. Even when they were in their prime,
Packard Bell's (not Hewlett-Packard) were the laughing stock of the PC
world for years. You're using a joke that's seven years old. If you
use your computer for anything besides word processing and e-mail,
then you'll find that anything at the budget entry level to be already
leagues ahead of that old PB. Put it this way, if you left the thing
on the side walk, no one would take it.
Good Luck.
Ralph
