Could use some help with a laptop problem

[RickM]

Max out your memory (RAM) and load XP. Also make sure your hard drive has enough free space to handle swapping. There are a few vendors on Ebay that sell RAM and drives very inexpensively. I was ready to toss an older Dell and this approach made it perform quite decently. I was on an old W98 install as well.

[daleflesburg]

I think if you were to remove everything and reinstall Win 98, and then only load an older version of office, excel and word, it could be a nice computer again. It probably has a lot of "stuff" loaded on it and just does not have the processor or the ram or the HD to handle it all.

It should be as fast as it was new, and it will never be better than that.
I doubt that its processor or its HD will handle XP

[KevinP73]

It had a bunch of garbage in the start up file and something in the msconfig about loading windows services which I deactivated and now it boots quickly. The h/d is only about 32% full. I ran the defrag even though it said it didn't need it. This will be fine for my kid to play her games and do some homework on. I've got no intention of using this for net access so I think it should do fine.