For a new PC right out of the box or with a fresh install of a new OS, one of the first things you should do is to make an image of your entire system using a "ghosting" or disk-imaging utility. This is even more important to buyers of newer PCs that don't include a Recover disk of their own.

Read SETUP.TXT in your Windows directory before installing Windows. If it's already installed, read it anyway. Read the README files that come with your programs, before installing them, if possible. Other files to read with Windows include MOUSE.TXT, FAQ.TXT, PROGRAMS.TXT, README.TXT, and GENERAL.TXT. A document called TIPS.TXT in your Windows folder may prove useful also.

One of the simplest ways to ensure the most stable operation of your Windows PC is to install as little software as possible on the beastie. You'll reduce the number of software conflicts, make the system easier to manage, and save disk space. But gee, Mr. Wizard, I thought computers were designed to run software...I know, I know.

In a strange, rather Zen way, system crashes, purges, and reboots can be good. A surprising amount of technically savvy users periodically flush and reboot their system as often as twice a year. They claim that it significantly improves performance and reliability. So, when your computer crashes and you have to scrub the whole thing, keep telling yourself that it's a good thing in the long run.

Windows 95 and its sibs Win 98 and Win ME are all rather unstable operating systems, partially by design (to accommodate Win 3.x and DOS-driven programs and devices, Win 95 left itself open to trouble) and partially by design flaws (a troublesome and only partially fixable memory leak). Never let either version run for too long when you're not using it; the memory leak accumulates over time and causes the system to crash. When you're not using the system, either shut your computer down or shut Windows down and let the computer stay in DOS. One source advises that you keep Windows running for two hours maximum before rebooting, unless you're using it to do something simple like typing; that sounds a little much to me. Other ways to lower the system stress on Windows is to keep the number of apps running as low as possible; to keep the number of windows open as low as possible; to minimize the open apps except for the one being used at the time (so much for layers of open windows); to avoid using the Alt+Tab shortcut with maximized windows (use the Taskbar instead); reduce the speed of the mouse to the lowest one you feel comfortable with (go through Control Panel/Mouse to play with the speed settings); avoid screen toys like fancy screensavers, wallpaper bitmaps, animated icons, desktop themes, and the like (use the ones provided by Windows itself, they are much lighter on system resources), avoid heavy apps like Lotus Organizer or MSOffice whenever possible, and when you do run them, don't run other programs along with them; avoid alarm/scheduler programs; stick to tried-and-true anti-virus programs and avoid newcomers which may gobble resources and cause crashes. Don't clutter up your Start menu with lots of extraneous toys, and check out WIN.INI for unneeded programs cluttering the LOAD= and RUN= lines. Does all of this sound rather anal to you? Me too, but low system resources cause crashes more often than anything else -- see below. Find out more about optimizing your system's memory management from content.techweb.com/winmag/columns/explorer/2000/11.htm, and go to radsoft.net/resources/software/reviews/rr/ for the dirt on programs that claim to rescue memory from Windows' grip, but actually do nothing.

A side note to the above: while dozens, if not hundreds, of mainstream commercial programs are significant RAM hogs, here's a list of a few -- a very few -- of the worst offenders: Adobe's Photoshop, Jasc's Paint Shop Pro, and other graphics programs; Corel's WordPerfect Suite and other apps not originally written for Windows; RealPlayer and other streaming media utilities; and instant messaging apps like AOL's IM and ICQ. Not that these are the only memory suckers, just some of the most frequently identified.

Second side note: the abovementioned memory leak was partially plugged in Win 98, but for some ungodly reason got worse in Win ME. Microsoft...gotta love 'em.

A recent list of programs that give Win ME nausea has been released. They include Cybermedia's Oil Change Uninstaller version 5 and earlier; Guard Dog version 2.5 and earlier; First Aid 97, 98 and 2000; McAfee Utilities 3.0; McAfee Office version 2; and McAfee Office 2000 (version 3.0). The Microsoft support page at support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/
q275/0/03.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=S explains what's going on (it involves a file corrupted by the above-named apps) and what you can do about it.

You need more RAM (Random Access Memory). Yes, you do. Low system resources is one of the biggest reasons for the frequency of Windows 9x crashes. This generally refers to memory. Although Win 95, for example, advertised itself as being able to run on as little as 4 MB of resident memory, this is much too low for the system to sustain itself over a period of time. The recommended 8mb of memory is barely adequate; 16 MB or above is a little better. The "sweet spot" for Win 95, according to one wonk, is 24 MB, where you get the most for your RAM dollar. Additional RAM speeds things up more, but with an ever-decreasing rate of return. These days, buying a new PC with less than 32 MB is foolish; and if you run large software programs like MS Office, the newer machines with 64 or 128 MB, or more, are a necessity rather than a luxury. The price of memory upgrading is dropping daily; it's worth a trip to your dealer to check it out. (Note: If you old 95 heads want to get truly powered-up by installing over 64 MB -- say you decide to go for 128 or 256 MB -- have a techie check to see if your chipset will support more than 64 MB without slowing down. Those using Intel's Pentium FX, TX, or VX chipsets might actually slow their systems down with too much RAM.) A common misperception is that Win 95 can't handle over 64 MB of RAM without slowing down appreciably. The truth is that Win 95 can handle up to 2 GB of RAM. The problem came with the Intel chipsets listed above, most noticeably the 430TX and the 430VX. Their Level 2 cache ignored all but the first 64MB of RAM, thus reducing their performance. Almost all Pentium II, and all PIII, users are in the clear, because their chipsets are either 440LX, FX, or BX, which can cache all the system RAM without choking. You might want to check out the info available at support.intel.com/support/motherboards, and check your own motherboard to see if you're running one of the offending chipsets. An informative discussion of motherboards and chipsets can be accessed at www.motherboards.org/chipset.html. Of course, memory requirements go up with more modern operating systems. Microsoft claims that Win 98 can run on as little as 24 MB and Millennium can run on 32 MB; the recommendations from other, more objective experts fix the minimums at 128 MB. (I'm currently running a Win ME system with 256 MB of RAM, and sometimes it's annoyingly slow.) Win XP is listed as needing a minimum of 64 MB, with 128 MB recommended, but in reality, 256 MB seems to be the lower limit if you want it to walk and talk as it's capable of doing. XP users will expect to use (and need) even more RAM; you guys can easily use 1 GB of RAM to kick your systems into high gear. XP users whose systems will support dual-channel memory should go for it. A good place for recommendations for both OS software and other programs (games, office suites, etc.) is at www.crucial.com/uk/library/softwareguide.asp.

One common sign that your memory is running dangerously low is when Explorer starts displaying the wrong icons. If you see this happening, immediately save your work and reboot. (One neat method is the "cool-boot" -- restarting Windows without shutting down the computer. Go through Start/Shut Down/Restart the computer, and as you click "Yes," hold down the Shift key.) If a program starts to misbehave (including making the system run more slowly, making the mouse jump around, making the screen twitch, whatever), save your work, shut down all programs, and cool-boot. Check your usage of system resources by going through Control Panel/System/Performance/System Resources. When the value displayed gets below 50%, save, shut down apps, and cool-boot. System Monitor is a useful tool to keep an eye on your system resources as well; it is provided with Windows but doesn't install in the Typical scenario. Fire it up through Programs/Accessories/System Tools, or just type SYSMON in the Run box. Most Windows apps take between 5% and 25% of the system resources, depending on their size and complexity. When you exit them, they release their resources. Groups and icons within a group, however, take between 1% and 25% of system resources and, once opened, keep resources in their grip until Windows is restarted. (Norton Desktop is an exception, taking 10% of the system resources but having its icons and groups self-contained and not dependent on system resources.) To find out how much RAM a particular app is sucking up, run System Monitor before firing up the app. Add the numbers from "Other memory" and "Swappable Memory," and subtract the result from "Disk Cache." Start the app and do the same calculation in System Monitor. The difference between the two totals is the amount of RAM that app is using.

Of course, nothing is simple in Microsoft land. Installing new "memory sticks" can cause more problems than it solves. Got problems? First, find out if your new memory stick is defective by downloading and running MemTest86 (free from www.memtest86.com/). In fact, you should run MemTest86 any time you install new memory. If the memory stick passes the test, your new memory module may have a timing mismatch with the old memory stick. Work around this by using the System Setup utility. Get into Setup when you boot up your computer (watch the screen for instructions), and in the memory timings area, check the Column Address Strobe (CAS) value. If it reads 2, change it to 2.5, save, and reboot. This will add time for both modules to react to inputs from the system. If this doesn't do the trick, underclock your system bus. In the Setup utility, find the settings for the frontside bus. Depending on your motherboard, you may be able to hand-tune the bus in 1MHz increments. Drop the bus speed by 10MHz or so. This will slow performance a bit, but it might be worth it to use the extra memory.

And, you should stick to buying all of your memory from the same manufacturer. For some reason, memory sticks from different manufacturers tend to fight for dominance inside your machine, causing you headaches.

Keep up with your system's memory usage by using System Monitor. Open it, click the Add button, choose "Memory Manager," and then choose "Unused Physical Memory." Memory use will be tracked as a graph over time. If you're regularly using 90% or thereabouts of your memory, you should seriously consider adding more RAM.

Every one of us has seen the scary error message, "There is not enough free memory to run this program. Quit one or more programs, and then try again." It isn't your memory that's depleted, it's your system resources. Without getting too technical (and confusing both you and me), Windows divides some of its memory into five specific areas called heaps, as in, "You got a heap o'memory, boy." These heaps belong to the core Windows libraries USER32.DLL and GDI32.DLL. The three USER heaps store internal info about active programs and their menus, along with other esoteric data we don't want to know about, while the two GDI heaps store system objects related to graphics. If you've read the earlier section about Win 95 being the bastard child of Win 3.x, then you'll understand when I tell you that one of the USER heaps and one of the GDI heaps are 16-bit leftovers from the 3.x days. They only have 64K capacity, and when they get jammed, they cause the bottlenecks that result in the ugly error message above. (Win 3.x only had 3 heaps, all 16-bit; as a result, it got jammed much more frequently than Win 9x on average.) Win 3.x depended on the individual program to clear the pipes after termination; the badly written ones that didn't would hog memory even after it was closed, resulting in a jam that required a reboot. Win 9x is a little better at memory management that 3.x, but programs that don't terminate, particularly those that run at startup, choke it regularly. If you find yourself getting this error message frequently, one of your startup apps is probably causing the system depletion. To locate the offender, you'll need to use the Resource Meter applet in Accessories. It's a simple set of bar graphs that is pretty self-explanatory. Fire up Windows, then fire up Resource Meter and note the USER and GDI settings. Go entertain yourself for a half an hour, come back, and record the settings again. You can do it a third or fourth time to really establish a flow. If there's a significant drop, one of your startup apps is draining your system. Use the freeware program Startup Cop from www.pcmag.com/download/ to see which programs are launched at startup, and use the program to temporarily disable half of them. Restart the computer and repeat the exercise with Resource Meter. If the drain is there, one of the programs you've disabled is the source of the problem; otherwise, it's in the other half. Re-enable the programs through Startup Cop. Now divide the "offending half" of the PC's programs into two halves again and repeat. Keep repeating until you've isolated the offender. If you have memory leaks but no startup offenders, you probably leave one app up all the time, and it is sucking up resources. You know what to do -- check elsewhere in this site to see how to remove startup programs and lose the offending fellow. Win98/ME still has the offending heap, but NT/2000 does not.

There's plenty more to talk about concerning system resources. If you're like a lot of so-called "power users," you're running 3 or 4 major programs at the same time, and open and close several more during a particular computing session. All of this hogs system resources, particularly when bad-mannered programs won't release their hold on resources even when they're closed. (Go to radsoft.net/Workshop/blacklst.htm for a list of the worst offenders. My jaw dropped as to how many of these badly-behaved apps I use every day.) The low-tech cure is to reboot the thing every so often, but there are better ways to reclaim your resources from greedy apps. MemTurbo is a $20 utility from www.memturbo.com/ that claims to automatically flush your memory taken up by DLL files not currently being used, and recover RAM that has leaked out into the Great Beyond; however, the boys at Radsoft have merrily torn MemTurbo and the programs like it to virtual shreds (visit radsoft.net/resources/software/reviews/rr/ to view the carnage). I have little use for the Radsoft people on a personal basis, but their expertise is well documented. On the other hand, I've used programs like MemTurbo myself, and they seem to work as advertised. As for tracking resource usage, you can use Windows' own Resource Meter...but Resource Meter is a resource hog itself. Hmmm. Two less intrusive utilities that monitor your resource usage for free are TClockEX, from users.iafrica.com/d/da/dalen/tclockex.htm, and PrcView 3.2.3.1, from www.teamcti.com/pview/default.htm, but remember, these are not memory "cleaners" or "restorers," they just monitor your system and report on conditions. Check out www.infinisource.com/win-resources.html for a non-techie walkthrough of system resources. A little knowledge can be a useful thing. Note: Win 98/ME users may not have the System Resource Meter installed on their machine. You can install it from the system CD by going through Add/Remove and clicking on the Windows Update tab. Click on System Tools, choose Details, check the box for the System Resource Meter, and click on OK twice.

Here are a few additional tips on managing your memory better: