> My boss just informed me we weren't to buy any more copies
> of WIN98 any edition.  Something in the operating system that
> will continue to slow your PC down over a 6 month period of
> time and that you have to fdisk, format and reload to speed things
> up again.  Any one hear this?

Tell your boss "Hey, welcome to the 1990's!" This issue has been
around for at least a decade, though it's not quite as s/he describes.

Windows-based systems tend to become "bogged down" over time due to a
number of factors, including the following:
 1) Increasing size of the registry due to installation of new
applications, coupled with incomplete removal of information from
uninstalling applications ("registry droppings")
 2) File remnants from incompletely-uninstalled applications ("file
droppings")
 3) Increasing fragmentation of the disk
 4) Increasing amounts of cached data, particularly fonts, icon data,
and browser-cache files
 5) Increasing size (both storage and working-set) of applications
("kitchen sink featureitis")

The "droppings" aspects of 1) and 2) are programming defects, as is
5). You can't fix them yourself, all you can do is try to correct the
results. The first half of 1) is an issue for people who install every
component of every piece of software they find, independently of
whether or not they need it (i.e., people like me). A larger registry
takes longer to process at startup.

3) is unavoidable, but is also correctable: run your disk
defragmenter. Win98 is actually better about this than previous
versions, because it works with components provided by Intel to
re-order the disk image of frequently-used applications so that they
load from disk more quickly. As a side note, I wonder if a half-heard
tenth-understood discussion of this issue is at least part of the
basis of your boss's claims.

4) is also, to some extent, a discipline issue: how many of us really
need 300 (or 500, or 1000...) fonts? I'm not sure how "Arabic
Transparent" or "Kunstler Script" got onto this machine, but I'm very
sure I've never used either one of them. Windows has to process
FNTCACHE.DAT every time it starts up; the more fonts it finds, the
longer it takes. Likewise for the browser history and cache data. And,
as nearly as I can tell, ShellIconCache never shrinks; it just
continues to grow with each new application or file type added. Mine
is 948KB, and I just rebuilt this machine from scratch on 24 July!

5) results in increasing memory usage by the ever-larger applications;
this causes increased use of disk-based virtual memory, which is
orders of magnitude slower than silicon. RAM is cheap enough that it's
easy to pump up a box you intend to use for a while. (Side note: any
time someone asks me about how much memory a home or business
non-server Windows computer should have, I tell them they have two
choices: 1 - 128MB; 2 - more)

With respect to your boss's correction sequence:
 FDISK is neither required nor desired, as least as far as "bogginess"
is concerned.
 FORMAT? Your call; defragmentation will give you 99+% of the value
for a fraction of the investment.
 Reload? If s/he means "reinstall *required* (as opposed to "because
they're there") applications into a fresh installation of Windows",
that's what cleans up the registry and cache info. If s/he means
"restore the entire disk from backup", you pretty much wasted your
time with the entire process.


Steve Dirickson   [log in to unmask]
WestWin Consulting  (36) 598-6111