lowlevel format?

[glenn570]

I appologize if this thread was duped, took a while for the page to load(cable) so I rebooted.
I hope I can find the answers I want in this forum.
My OS is Windows ME, 63 MBram- HP Pavilion, 766 Cellron, 32-bit file system, with a 28.6 GB HD. You must be thinking, "With this system the solution is simple, chuck it out the window!" I can't afford this now or anytime in the future, I'm severely disabled, unable to work and a computer with an Internet connection is the only way, except via sail mail, to communicate to the outside world. I've been having problems with slowness and my "performances/system recourses" is only reading 45% free. I know this is at elate half of what it was when it was new. Is this due to RAM trouble? I was told to try a low-level format and doing so would make my computer run as it did when it was new. If I were to do this would I need an OS CD from MS or can I just use the manufacturer's restore CD? I know how to reformat and restore as I've done it thousands of times on this PC and others, but never a low-level format; I have no clue. I do hope that in time I'll be able to upgrade to GHZ speed and double the RAM.
Thanks in advance,
Glenn
Please email me at aysdogtrainer@charter.net

[DoctorReno]

You may not have a screaming raped ape system but i think it is probaby very adequate for most of what you do and or need.

There is no such thing as a low level format for modern HD's. When people say low level format today, technically what they mean is a Zero Fill Format. This is a utility that will write zeros to every single sector on the HD which effectively erases EVERYTHING. It restores your drive to as near as possible to a new out of the box drive also called RAW. Although it is not necessary to do a zero fill before reinstalling an OS I have made it a practice to do so because this is one of the only ways to get rid of difficult to detect boot sector viruses and other nasties that will survive thru a normal format procedure. You can get a zero fill utility from most HD mfgs as a free download with their utilities disks. Personally, I use the Seagate Diskwizard utility because it is simple and works on every drive that I know of.

I am not certain but I believe that the mfg. restore CD that you speak of is not a complete CD so it will lack certain essential files to do a "clean" install of the OS. You will need one that is complete from the 3rd party or an original MS CD.

As far as resources, you probably have a lot of applications that try to load and run in the background everytime you start your machine and they are eating up your resources. Check your Startup folder and see if you can set some of these unnecessary apps to not run at startup. You may also be able to use the msconfig utility to stop many of these apps from running at startup.

[glenn570]

[b]As far as resources, you probably have a lot of applications that try to load and run in the background everytime you start your machine and they are eating up your resources. Check your Startup folder and see if you can set some of these unnecessary apps to not run at startup. You may also be able to use the msconfig utility to stop many of these apps from running at startup.[b/]

This I've done already. I don't want to jump guns and do something I'll regret later. See, if I did find out how to do this "zero fill" on the net I would have done it and not had the OS, I do have 98 though. I also understand ME "leaks" resouces for some unknown reason. So where can I pick up these utilities for "zero fill"? I'm still going to hold off and concider my options, heck I'll still need to wait a bit to but the MS ME CD.
Glenn

[DoctorReno]

The Seagate Diskwizard Starter Edition that will require 2 floppies can be downloaded at:http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/...s/discwiz.html

Another utility that will do a zero fill and or write random data to the drive multiple times AND will also overwrite floppies is a shareware utility: http://www.east-tec.com/sanitizer/

If you have any questions on how to run these utilities PM me and I can send you instructions or answer questions.

[SeanC]

Would you be able to upgrade the RAM to 96MB or 128MB? It wouldn't be very expensive at all. That would help performance a lot. The CPU and hard drive are plenty for web surfing, e-mailing and word processing. The RAM is the only part that is a little lacking.