OT - Totally

[John Musselwhite]

At 07:00 PM 7/6/2003 -0500, Avery wrote:

>Since the list is kind of slow right now, I'm going to take
>a chance and post a totally OT post, computer related.
>
>Have any of you ever had anything to do with an old (1995 ish)
>IBM Aptiva?

I have one here. It's a Pentium running Win 98. Is that what you have?

There seems to be two major problems I've encountered with it. The first is 
that it seems to be very sensitive to power line fluctuations and would 
"hang" quite frequently on our house power here.  A UPS solved that problem.

The other was a lack of memory. It's running the supplied Win 98, but it 
came with only 32 megs of memory and a 2 gig hard drive. Win 98 takes 64 
megs (roughly) just to boot up and if you have less it's as slow as 
molasses in winter. Plugging in 128 megs of RAM and a big drive made it 
quite tractable. Fortunately, I had both here from other machines. If I'd 
had to buy them new it may not have been worthwhile.

>Even when nothing else is running, it takes several minutes to
>open when I click on the Start button!

If the computer has been used a lot it could have almost anything running 
on it. Boost the memory, back up your data and restore the system from the 
disk. Be aware that it will delete *everything* on the drive when you do that.

Memory is cheap at the moment. Slap in a 64 meg stick (or two) and restore 
the system and it should run fine. DO make sure that you log on to Windows 
update and get all the patches, though.

                         John