AOL/ Explorer freezing

Explorer and AOL are freezing sometimes when I access AOL DSL. If I click on a site the hand icon comes up and AOL or Explorer freeze. Sometimes after pressing Co/alt/del I can see that either Aol or Explorer are not responding . If I close explorer the icons on the task bar disappear and I can carry on. Any ideas? PC spec, AuthenticAMD AMD Athlon(tm) Processor
240MB RAM
39% system resources free
Windows-managed swap file on drive C (30610MB free)
Available space on drive C: 30610MB of 39070MB (FAT32)

 

98 SE.

 

Hello there and I am glad to see u have joined our great litle group here on wilders.
I have AOL 9 installed on my system and before I upgraded my ram, I did not have enough memory to run aol properly, at this moment I am using 275 mb of ram, just to run all my applications including aol as well, which does use a lot of ram unfortunatly, so an upgrade would definatly make a difference to your system freezing.
If u can afford it, it would be best to have about 512 mb ram installed.

Your friend

THE MUL

 

uh....yeah.....it's 2005, even 512mb is just getting by these days. Programs are just too memory intensive. And running AOHell on top of it is just too much for so little memory. You might consider an XP upgrade as well, 98SE is...well...1998! It's 2005!!! Seven years is an eternity in computing. Good luck!

 

Cheers all. In fact, I'm looking to build my own PC in the next month or so and would be interested in finding out members' opinions of the best case with its PSU, motherboard, processor with heat sink and fan, RAM modules, video card, Sound card, Speakers, Hard drive, Floppy drive, CD/DVD drives, Modem available.

 

With 39% system resources free you're either running some obese Sygate/Mcafee setup or you've got too many programs running in the background. How many icons are there in the taskbar by the clock? All that stuff sucks resources will cause your computer to take longer to start and make everything you do SLOWER. And it will cause errors like yours.

Open MSCONFIG.EXE, click Startup tab and uncheck anything you rarely use like Scanner/Printer or CDRW software. That stuff serves no purpose running when you're not using it. You'll probably find a lot of hidden junk in there like "RealUpdate" "reminders", etc.. Possibility theres even a nasty somewhere causing problems. If you have any questions about a startup items either type the exe name into google or post back.

I think you should try that before you go buying more memory to run unused/unknown programs. 240 is MORE THAN ENOUGH for Windows 98. Even with AOL.