word freezes in 98 - help?

My dad's been given this Toshiba Satellite Pro 480CDT laptop with
Windows 98 on it. It has 80 meg ram, a 4 gig drive and unspecified
processor speed. It serves internet use well, only a bit slower than
my almost current laptop. About the equivalent of a side-and-a-half of
letter-sized paper into a document, things freeze up using Word.
Things freeze with a Checkers games on this computer, too. I ran the
same version of Word, 97, on my old desktop, which had 16 meg of ram.
I'm neither novice nor expert, so I'm wondering if the problem is
something to do with the fact that someone's partitioned the hard
drive. The hd is divided into C and D, and D is empty (in fact C is
half empty too, so I'm a bit puzzled about the freezing). They're both
FAt32 type, if that's relevant. Can the partition be simply removed?
(I would like to do this to make space even if it won't help with the
problem I'm describing.) I don't want to be reinstalling Windows and
foraging for drivers and so on, for its CD player and suchlike. There
is no set-up disk or manual (though coming with this laptop was both a
Win 95 and Win 98 CD) so I'd like to avoid this. So what's the
problem? Thanks for all help.

Please stick with your post in the other newsgroup to get the best
assistance possible.

--
Richard G. Harper [MVP Shell/User]
* PLEASE post all messages and replies in the newsgroups
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My dad's been given this Toshiba Satellite Pro 480CDT laptop with
Windows 98 on it. It has 80 meg ram, a 4 gig drive and unspecified
processor speed. It serves internet use well, only a bit slower than
my almost current laptop. About the equivalent of a side-and-a-half of
letter-sized paper into a document, things freeze up using Word.
Things freeze with a Checkers games on this computer, too. I ran the
same version of Word, 97, on my old desktop, which had 16 meg of ram.
I'm neither novice nor expert, so I'm wondering if the problem is
something to do with the fact that someone's partitioned the hard
drive. The hd is divided into C and D, and D is empty (in fact C is
half empty too, so I'm a bit puzzled about the freezing). They're both
FAt32 type, if that's relevant. Can the partition be simply removed?
(I would like to do this to make space even if it won't help with the
problem I'm describing.) I don't want to be reinstalling Windows and
foraging for drivers and so on, for its CD player and suchlike. There
is no set-up disk or manual (though coming with this laptop was both a
Win 95 and Win 98 CD) so I'd like to avoid this. So what's the
problem? Thanks for all help.