I'm still using 98SE on my second computer. IE6 is installed now but it is slow. Is 6 and up compatible with SE or should I try to find 4.0? Any other hints that might work? It seems like the connection worked quicker before. My kids use this computer and they "said" nothing has been installed any different. I reinstalled SE to see what that would do but it's still slow.

IE4 is native to 98SE but mostly useless for use on the Net. IE6 should not , by itself, cause any reduction in connection speed. However, all the security updates could have some effect I'm guesing you are on Dial-up and the slow down is likely your ISP plus any AntiVirus/AntiMalware programs you or your ISP are running. Next possibility would be all the garbage files that are collected after Surfing the Net for a long time. Download and install ccCleaner to rid your system of unnecessary files etc.. http://www.filehippo.com/download_c... There is nothing to learn from someone who already agrees with you.

Yeah, don't use IE 4. I even had to upgrade my 98 machine from IE 5.5 to 6 in order to get ebay to work right.

Clean the junk off of the system. I have a Dell laptop 266 MHz 128 MB. I prefer Firefox for a browser. I can open several pages at a time.

98SE with 512MB RAM should run extremely well. If you're having "slowness" issues, IE6 isn't the problem. As for your kids saying "nothing has been installed any different"...it's very possible (depending on what type of sites they hit) that malware/spyware jumped on the system without them even knowing it. Are there any toolbars installed (Yahoo or Google for example)? Get rid of them...they're spyware. Do they use Limewire or any other P2P file sharing service? Download CCleaner Slim, install it & use it regularly to clean up the accumulated internet garbage. Personally, I use it several times a day, basically after each online "session". And if you don't have one, you should get a decent anti-spyware program & use that regularly. http://www.ccleaner.com/download/bu... http://www.filehippo.com/download_s... Also run MSCONFIG & check the startup list. A lot of programs add a startup entry to the list when it's not really needed. Better to start a program manually on an as-needed basis than to have it load at startup & continually run in the background hogging system resources. http://netsquirrel.com/msconfig/msc... This can also be done using CCleaner...click Tools, then Startup.

IE6 is the last version of Microsoft's browser which runs on Win98. If everything is properly setup and configured, it runs very well on Win98, IE4 does not run any better. Since Microsoft declared Win98 obsolete, the world is obediently complying and no longer supports the OS. Therefore, the new versions of IE or Firefox will not run on Win98. However, the newest version of Opera will still work just fine by just upgrading the msimg32.dll file (free on the Internet). The directive from Microsoft to Opera must have gotten lost in the E-mail. Do try to use the various system cleaning software suggested in previous posts. As long as it's free to use, it doesn't hurt to try, and it may very will get things back to acceptable performance. If not, then the best solution, if you have all the original software disks which came with the machine, is to strip the hard drive with a re-format and do a clean install. It's a lot of work, though. If you do decide to go that route you should study up some on the possible options during the setup. But, if done properly, you'd be surprised at how well that old computer will run. Just like new. Even better than new if you do some basic system modifications during the install.

Dude, if you can find IE 5.1 I would totally advise you to use that version. Always gave me flawless performance. Im on XP and Vista now, but I always appreciated that rock solid version for 98se and even win 95. Rich Gu