My computer is a Pentium II 366 MHz with a 4GB hard drive (500 MB free), running Windows 98. My main problem is the speed at which the system operates. The computer boots and switches between programs very slowly, even though I regularly run the Maintenance Wizard, with Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter. I read in one of your earlier articles something about spyware, and the process for eliminating this - could this be part of the problem?

From the description of the machine, I can tell you that most of your performance issues are due to the age of the machine. Unfortunately, with the pace of technology a computer which you may have bought 5 years ago is now quite slow. The clock speed of your processor is very slow and combined with the very small amount of disk space you have available you would experience quite sluggish performance. I am also guessing that you don’t have much RAM installed, which is not helping the situation! If you are getting frustrated with the performance, perhaps you should consider buying a new computer. I would not recommend upgrading your existing system, since you would essentially need to get a complete system rebuilt on your existing machine anyway. A good place to start is dell.com.au, which allows you to build a custom machine and view the price immediately. You could get a very reasonable machine with monitor for around $1,000.