98SE Locks up

I have an AMD Athalon 650 with 192MB of Ram. I am having problems with it locking up when I use a program such as Microsoft picture it or Adobe Photoshop. I have also had problems with it locking up when I get done scanning something. I ran Norton Antivirus thinking maybe I picked up a virus, no virus. I have deleted many programs off my system and decided to start the defrag process and it goes to 10% then starts over again. I then deleted all the programs that may be running and I get the same result. This leads me to believe that it is my OS. Can anyone help me with this problem?

stay offline, turn off virus scanners and such.
run msconfig, Run - msconfig - look under startup tab to see if you have anything you didn't asked to be run at startup.

clean out browser cache/cookies, remove temp files (.tmp), recent, whatever else you have like log files from IRC, leftover files/folders from stuff you deleted.
then turn off virtual memory (ignore the popup),
reboot,
run scandisk with advanced options (logfile - no log, crosslinked - delete, lost file fragments - free,
then run defrag turning off rearrange files option in it first,
when all done turn back on virtual memory and reboot

I do this cleaning often, once you get the hang of it it's pretty simple

if you suspect to have something else running hidden then try spyware removing software

good luck

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Also run System File Checker to make sure you don't have any damaged system files.



Details, Details, Its all in the Details, If you need help, Don't leave out the Details.

Whenever you want to defrag or scandisk it is a good idea to turn off all anti-virus programs, background utilites, and get offline since these processed tend to read/write to hardisks rapidly, which force the defragger or scan program to restart.

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