Expert: Carolyn Meinel - 11/12/2005

Question
Hi Carolyn,
I use w98,
IE6, 126 MB Ram
65% of resources are free,
Iam segmented into three partitions on 13 GB H/D  C:  has 5831 MB of 7985 MB D: has very little space used  E: has 1724 MB of 4673 MB used;
I use Computer Associated Easy Armour Virus protection, and fire wall.
I also have a hard firewall.

Things seem to run slow at times, For example when I surf a new site on the web or recieve a new E-mail from a new person thing run slow.  i see the EZ Armour Firewall logo go very slow.  Also when I go to E-mail protection things like HTML Applications, MS Dos Applications, Security Certificate and a few other thing are quarantined.  Could this be part of the problem.  Also Since I have a hard firewall do I need the EZ armour firewall.

after surfing the web a little bit my C:drive goes down to 1.94 MB of free space.  if I clear out temp internet files it goes back up to 5.69 GB

I use
Ez-Armour
Spy-bot
Ad-adaware
all updated and I scan frequently for viruses and found nothing.

I am at a loss, any tips.  Tired of slow surfing.

Thanks for your help
God Bless,
Don Crosby jr.

Answer
It sounds like you have been taking all the right precautions. I agree with you that adding a software firewall was a good move.

Judging from what you report, it sounds like you may have been surfing websites with tremendous amounts of images. The problem is that IE saves all those images for days on end in temporary Internet files, and this can do quite a job of filling up your hard drive. When the hard drive gets too full, it will slow your computer.

If, indeed, this is the problem, here are things that can help.

1. Defragment your hard drive frequently. To open Disk Defragmenter, click Start, point to Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click Disk Defragmenter.

2. Run a program that automatically cleans out the cache of saved Internet images. There are many products that will do this. I prefer Zone Alarm Pro because it is a powerful firewall that also can be set to clean your browser cache automatically every day.

3. Finally, the Firefox browser, free from www.mozilla.org, is faster than IE and also much safer. The kinds of sites you probably are visiting are likely to try to download dangerous programs through IE. Firefox adds an extra layer of security which might catch things that your other security programs miss.