PC is extremely slow

Hi there,
My mother’s PC is a Win98SE, Compaq Pentium 2, with 256mb RAM, 40GB HDD. We have taken this PC to be investigated for it’s slowness, with the result that upon it’s return it’s even slower.

I have checked out some of the settings that I suspect may have some bearing on it’s slowness. What has my stumped is the virtual memory is set at -32666GB. Why the the ‘-‘ sign? I tried ‘setting my own memory’ but hasn’t changed the setting ing the ‘HDD free’.
I have uninstalled, defragged, checked running processes, ran various Anti-Virus/Trojen programs etc and have over 30GB free HDD space. I am stumped! As you can imagine it’s really frustrating when my Pentium, 32mb RAM & 4GB HDD is faster than hers.

I’d appreciate any suggestions. I have tried other ‘performance increase’ products but still no improvement.
Thanks in advance,
Ingelise.