>win98SE and a bunch of apps.
>
>She has 4 printers (3 parallel, 1 usb). The usb one gave me some trouble, and epson's tech support line was "in these cases we recommend a full reinstall" - DUH! THAT'S WHAT I JUST DID!!!!
>
>Anyway, I finally managed to get things to work, but Susanna's complaining that the computer's running slower than before. The only new app she's having is mcafee's vshield, but I didn't expect it to make a dent on the performance of a P-III 550 with 128MB ram.
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>The thing is that if she keeps complaining I can't think of anything other than win2000. Any comments? Is it worth taking this leap so soon after its release? Should I wait until at least they come out with 1 service pack?

You did the fresh SE install without the McAfee on the machine at all? That fouled my SE install up a couple times, disabling it doesn't work, because it starts up again on a Win Restart, and may cause trouble.

WinME (Millenium, the natural 9x upgrade) is due out pretty soon, too, and may be better suited to home use (and much cheaper). I'm going to make that move at home. I've had periodic slowness and hanging ever since I installed 98SE - I've reinstalled everything more than once, too. I really should have stayed with 98 1st edition, no doubt about it, everything was working fine.

Anyway, I have improved things considerably by using Netscape 4.7 instead of IE5. I've had periodic DLL errors along with slowness and hangs, almost always related somehow to IE, that have disappeared since using NS. So, you might try Netscape if you're not now using it, it *might* help, anyway...

Matter of fact, I'm going to go check on the WinME release date right now, see if it's set yet.