Can you help please?

Emrys Davies wrote (in alt.windows98)

My wife is using my 15 year old PC and it has a fault amongst many
as you will expect but can you help with this one?

It is a Win. 98 SE with a C Drive capacity of 19.1 GB of which 5.47
GB is used. It has 384.0 MB of RAM and 65 per cent of this is free.

I strongly suggest you obtain a new hard drive and at least clone
(duplicate) your current drive to the new drive. The components of your
old computer can operate for many years, except for the hard drive.
Your drive is living on borrowed time and it might even now have bad
sectors that are causing operational problems.

Boot / start the computer in DOS mode and run scandisk from the dos
prompt, correct any problems with the file system, and let scandisk
perform a surface test to find bad sectors.

And remember that drives don't last forever. My experience is that 20
gb drives in particular had a high failure rate compared to 40 and 80 gb
drives.

It has 'Google' and 'IE' icons on its desktop which take one minute
to open, respectively,

There could be many reasons why it takes so long to start IE. You could
have many other programs running that are taking too much memory.

Turn off (or just un-install) any antivirus software you have. Windows
98 does not need antivirus software. I run windows 98 exclusively and
haven't used AV software for more than 7 years. Virus's and trojans do
not infect Windows 98 any more - they are designed to run on NT-based
windows (like XP, vista, 7, etc). AV software running on win-98 is a
waste of what little memory and CPU power you have.

and when they do a little window shows: 'Iexplore with a solid
red circle which has a large white X therein and the window
contains the words 'Zu wenig Arbeitsspeicher' and OK thereon.

I assume you are in Germany, and you have a German version of Windows
98.

Zu wenig Arbeitsspeicher translates as "Enough Memory".

I'm assuming the actual message is that you don't have enough memory to
run the program.

On that computer, click the Start button, select Run, and type
"msconfig" and hit enter.

Select "Startup" (the tab on the far right) and remove the checkbox for
any programs that are not needed. If you don't know how to decide, post
the list of the names of those programs here and I can tell you.

When clicked the latter opens instantly to the Google 'Home' page,
to which it is set.

All other icons on the desktop open instantly, including Outlook
Express.

I ran it for viruses and found 12 'FunWebproducts'

That is not a virus. See here to remove:

http://help.funwebproducts.com/uninstall/uninstall.html

and 29 '/info: Cookie information database'.

Those are not important.

Any ideas please. I have a tip nearby, but my wife appears to
manage with this and does not want a new one.,

I very strongly suggest you install an old version of Firefox and use it
instead of IE. Firefox 2.0.0.20 is much better than Internet Explorer.
I can post a link where to download it if you want.