I have an older computer which is really getting sluggish. Dell suggests I clean the hard drive and reload. My question is I presently have windows 98 updated to ME and it has worked fine up until recently. Should I just load windows 98 and not update with ME when I reload the clean hard drive. I figure the windows 98 loaded alone may work better as it is just one clean loaded program. I have also read on here that I can load ME off the update disc by simply putting in the windows 98 version disc when the system asks to verifiy the original 98 version. Is this then a cleaner load rather than loading windows 98 and then updating with the ME disc. I am trying to have as simple working hard drive as possible without freeze ups or slowdowns. Thanks for any advice. By the way I never had a problem with this computer until I loaded and unloaded the new Norton Internet Security Program. It really screwed things up even though Symantec assisted me in removing it and reloading my original old NIS program. My present XP computer gives me no such problems and the new version of NIS works just fine on XP. Thanks again for any info on the formating and reload of my older pentium 3 computer.....boy am I running off at the mouth...lol Thanks Teabag

Win98 clean install M2 If at first you don't succeed, you're about average.

FWIW, recommend steering clear of Windows ME. Microsoft MVP Windows - Shell/User

teabag, There is no reason not to use ME if you do just a couple little things to it. The best thing you can do is to use "Trevs Tweaks" http://www.burzurq.com/forum/trevtweak.html Do as many of the things on the list as you can and you can get ME running pretty well. Another thing I would do is STAY AWAY from Norton. It embeds itself into the system too much and it seems to conflict with a lot of applications. What I did is download "Avast" anti virus (free) or "AVG" anti virus, which also free, and both are very good. Use spybot, and ad-aware (I try to run these 3 at least once a week) and between those 3 things plus scan disc and defrag occasionally, you should be able to keep ME going pretty well. Occasionally I also use a little program call "ccleaner" (not a spelling mistake) and that does a good job cleaning out caches and temp files and old links, etc. But the best thing you can do is to print off trevs Tweaks and that will solve A LOT of ME problems. Good luck and I hope this helps you.