I disagree, Ron, and I've been around the block too. You do NOT want to have your virus checker running in the background all the time! You can still have it run live for checking your email. These are separate options with Norton and with most decent ones. Virus checkers are notorious for causing system problems and slowdowns when constantly running in memory. Scan your system regularly for viruses, however. Defragging is a waste of time, especially for newer harddrives. Once a month is certainly sufficient. The only way a defragger can keep your harddrive running absolutely smoothly is to run it every day and that is just silly. Harddrives are meant to hunt all over your harddrive...that's what they do. Defragging can probably tire them much more than that. Do, however, run scandisk frequently. Using a memory manager was useless to me on Win98 because I could handle it better myself with the vcache setting, but they've been helpful to others. BTW I ran Poser 4 under Win98 on an old PII450 with 256 megs of ram until just 4 months ago and had no problems. I rarely defragged, probably twice in 3 years, never ran my virus checker live in the background, went into Safe mode once a month, didn't use a memory manager, and let windows manage the swap file. I must have been doing something right. Sylvia