Before you read any further, go to your PC, turn it on, and defrag your hard drive. You can use the Windows 98 defrag utility. If you happen to have Norton Utilities, and you use Norton Speedisk, you can set it up to move your files around for optimal start-up. But the important thing is to simply defrag once a month or so.

If you've been using Windows 98 for a while, you may notice that your disk drive will start thrashing like a freshly caught catfish at seemingly random intervals. It's disconcerting to say the least and a serious performance drag at times. There are actually several potential causes for this.

First, if you have Microsoft Office 95 or 97 installed, make sure you remove the Fast Find utility from the start-up folder. Fast Find periodically indexes the hard drive so it can search for files faster. Unfortunately, I've seen Fast Find do this at really inconvenient times.

Another possible cause of disk thrashing is that Windows 98 will occasionally grow or shrink the swap file (virtual memory file) according to some mysterious algorithm that seems to depend on the alignment of the planets. You can stop this from happening by setting the maximum and minimum swap file sizes to the same number. A conservative rule of thumb is to set it to 2.5x your installed memory, though if you have more than 128MB, 1.5 to 2x is more than enough. This will create a permanent swap file that won't grow or shrink. After you've done this, and then rebooted, you'll want to defrag one more time. Note that if you have two physical hard drives, putting the swap file on the second (non-boot) hard drive can also speed up access to virtual memory. Do not do this if you have a single physical drive with two partitions.

Finally, one other culprit is Windows 98's disk cache. In the old days, you had SMARTDRV, but that's long since been replaced by VCACHE. VCACHE is a program that caches hard-drive data in system memory. Occasionally, VCACHE can get pretty big. This can have two simultaneous adverse effects. First, you have less memory for your programs. Second, the disk will begin to thrash as VCACHE gets big and programs are forced to swap to virtual memory. One solution is to limit the size of VCACHE. You do this by editing the file \windows\system.ini. Search for VCACHE - you'll probably find it as a header with no entries underneath. Ideally, you'd like VCACHE to be about one-fourth of your system RAM up to 64MB. If you have more than 64MB, leave it at 16MB. The key is to make it a fixed number for minimum and maximum. Add the following two items underneath the VCACHE heading:

  MinFileCache=16384
 
  MaxFileCache=16384

Do this only if you have more than 16MB of system RAM.

You may want to play around with this setting a bit over time, but remember that any memory that VCACHE uses isn't available for your programs. On the other hand, if VCACHE is too small, you'll notice more disk activity every time you load your system. If you're curious, you can monitor your VCACHE behavior with a cool tool called VCMon, which you can download from www.sysinternals.com/vcmon.htm.

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