Crucial computer question - please help!!!

actually yeah I think it is due to the fucked up way Windows works. My Windows folder holds 1.3G of files!! Hotfixes are patches and/or upgrades, usually you have to go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and approve them.

Yeah, that's pretty normal for Windows XP, unfortunately. XP is great at recognizing old hardware when you're doing an installation, but in most cases if you're moving up from a machine that was designed for Win 95 or even Win 98, the hardware may not have enough juice to run Win XP without it feeling like it's gunked up by molasses or something like that.

Easiest way to get more speed out of that thing is to see if you can add more memory, because that always helps. If you're running anything less than 256 megs with that thing you'll be having speed problems. 256 megs is better, 512 megs is ideal. If your machine can handle that much memory, that is.

If you're comfortable with a bit of tinkering with the startup settings, you can go to Start/Run and then type in "msconfig" and then choose the startup tab. It'll list all of the programs that will be loaded into memory when you start your machine, and no doubt a lot of them can be disabled to speed things up somewhat. You shouldn't be able to do any serious damage to your machine playing around with that, but make a note of what you've changed so you can go back and fix it up if any of your software stops working afterwards.

Oh, and yes, Windows Hotfixes are system patches and other fixes to make sure that WinXP ain't opening up your data to everyone in the world. You can tell from the number of them just how much fun people are having finding the holes.

have you tried 'Disk Cleanup' in: start>programs>accessories>system tools> ?

click the more options tab and there you can remove some 'system restores' (which take up lots of space).

HOWEVER, you probably don't want to remove the hotfixes as they are usually important security or other functionality patches.

There's no way you should be running XP on any computer nine years old. Is it really nine years old? Cause then it would be, what, 266Mhz or slower!? I think that's below the minimum suggested specs for XP. And XP should really be taking up way more than 375mb. I can't think of even any minimum kind of installation that would be less than a gig. I can't make sense of your situation, honestly, but, yeah, don't remove those hotfixes.

thanks for all the help fellas.

Now, say I move all my Word documents onto a floppy and just uninstall XP - good idea? can i then get windows 98 or something?

obviously i'm computer illiterate so pardon my frustrating lack of know-how. I have no idea how many mhz I have - how do i find that out?

To find out how fast your computer is, right-click your My Computer icon and select "properties", and it should tell you your processor and speed.

You might not be able to roll back to Win 98 so easily unless your hard drive is formatted as FAT; if it's NT file system you'll probably need to wipe the drive out at the partition level and start again. Backing up all of your files is always a good idea anyhow.

Eight years ago, in 1995-96, I seem to recall that 133Mhz was a top of the range processor. We all fought over the Pentium 75Mhz machines in our computer lab. I can't believe roger is really running XP on a nine year old machine, unless it's been heavily upgraded.