Help please. :( I don't want to take my PC to the shop.

[ugotcarrie]

I'm hoping all you experts can help a determind newbie like me.

My PC started going slow, then a message flashed by saying
hisym <-(or close)driver not working. I got new memory at ebay poped it in, reformatted the HD and my PC is still crawling. Please tell this "DUMMY" if I need to by something else and how to find out the exact name of the driver. TIA I don't want to spend a fortune at the shop!?!?!

[LPMiller]

need more information...what are your system specs? Processor, memory, operating system?

[ugotcarrie]

Thank you VERY MUCH for answering.
My specs are: Pentuim 200, memory 8 8 32 32, windows 95

[LPMiller]

That helps.

Well, considering the age of the PC, not much a shop is going to do for you - I'd consider starting to save up for a new PC. Even the lowest of the lowends would be faster than what you have.

Now, I assume the reformat fixed the himem.sys error, which is usually cause by either a bad driver or a corrupt file. As to the slowness, could be anything, but here are some areas to check.

Drivers, specificly video, sound and network....any one of those can seriously slow down a 95 system.

A Virtual memory problem. If your C drive is full, or say, has less then 500MB available, VM really bogs down the system. A bigger harddrive or moving the cache to another partition can help - keep in mind there is I think an 8GB limit for Windows 95 OSR2, might be less depending on your motherboard/bios.

A program running in the task tray. Anti Virus, RealAudio, Winamp, AOL...pretty much every program tries to 'speed' itself up by loading a little program at startup. Problem is, most of them end up bogging the overall system down, so the gain is nothing. Disable anything in there you don't need - most programs will work without that task tray option, though you'll want to keep the virus checker. Still, if you are using an older anti virus program, it could be the problem child.

[ugotcarrie]

THANK YOU!
I cleared out the tool tray and it flys!
You really made my DAY!!!!!! ! :) Yippee!
Thank you very much!
Carrie

[MJordanash]

Sorry if this is a repost but cant you just go to Start > Run > msconfig > Enter > Startup > and from there decide which utilities you want to start whenever you fire up your system? I find that to be much easier than going through each item on my taskbar and configuring it. :D

[Speedfreak]

Originally posted by ugotcarrie
THANK YOU!
I cleared out the tool tray and it flys!

If you want to see something really fly, get a new computer.


What do you use it for, anyway?