PC losing steam

1. In AOL, compress your personal filing cabinet. In IE, delete temporary internet files.

2. Run msconfig. On the Startup tab, disable as many things as possible (i.e., thing srunning in your system tray that you don't really need.

3. Runscan disk and defrag.

Since you know that your resources degrade, I assume you are running a program to show you free memory and resources.
The problem you are having comes from the constant growth of the cache in each of the programs you are running.
We get around this problem by brute force.
We run a machine for a day and then raise the amount of installed RAM to cover total needs plus a safety factor. (64 Meg free RAM at shutdown, with no virtual memory in use.)
We get away with this approach because RAM is cheap.
WARNING! There can be memory issues with Win98 when you go over 512 Meg.

So we limit most PCs to 512 Meg.
(A pair of 256 Meg DIMMs.)

Regards, Chris

It's normal for any windows platform, to loose performance as the day goes by, it's windows!
The system begins to have holes of memory, unused variables that can hog the system.Afer, say 3 hours.. if you reboot the system and everything is fine, the problem is software. So try to identify which aplication is hogging your system (look at startup also)
If not, if you have lo leave the system for a while in order to loose temperature, the problem is hardware. Some of your coolers can be damaged or a tamper air flow.
Temperature can make your system work worst.