Periodic lags

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G

Guest

I'm have a P4, approx 2 Ghz machine with 256K RAM and XP. I use McAfee's
firewall and virus scan. I also use Earthlink's scanner to regularly
eliminate spyware and also regularly eliminate internet temp files. I run
the defrag program once in a while (HD is 80 G). I run virus scan about
weekly.

The problem is: When I am typing inputs to almost any application (eg:
Outlook express email, Word, Excel) or playing a game, the action stops
momentarily every few seconds. This results in my continuing to type with a
pause in visible output until it catches up (I don't type very fast) or the
game hanging up momentarily. It's very annoying. Things also seem to be
running slower, in general, than in the past.

I've searched the available messages in this news group and read everyone
with 'slow' in it but have not found (or recognized) any help for my
problem.

I would appreciate any help.

Thanks,

Mitch
 
You may have too many programs running in the background. Check your
system tray for unwanted stowaways such as RealPlayer which are
quietly hogging RAM.

You could also try turning off some of Windows XP's visual effects to
reduce memory useage. To get to these settings do the following:
1. Click Start, click Control Panel, click Performance and
Maintenance, and then click System.
2. Click the Advanced tab, and then under Performance, click Settings.
3. Click the Visual Effects tab
4. Click Custom, and then click to select the check boxes for those
items that you want to turn on. Click to clear the check boxes for the
items that you want to turn off.


I hope this was helpful.
 
I also noticed something like this. I think I first saw it after I upgraded
to SP1.

The machine would pause for a few seconds then catch up. This was most
noticable when typing into Word. I would be typing away then I would
suddenly have to wait for what I had just typed to appear. Sometimes it
appeared as if I could over-run the keyboard buffer by a few characters as
not all would appear.

The problem fixed itself, possibly when I did a Windows update (or updated
Norton Anti Virus?) no idea which update though.

If anything I have more background programs running now than ever before and
it's as fast as ever.

Colin
 
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