Screen repaint is horribly slow when Explorer or IExplorer running

  • Thread starter Thread starter kenandcorey
  • Start date Start date
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kenandcorey

I am experiencing a very odd situation. I have an ATI Radeon 9600 AGP
card running Windows XP Pro SP2. The CPU is an AMD 3500+ (I believe),
so it's nice and fast. 2GB of RAM too.

The screen repainting rate is very fast when I DON'T have Windows or
Internet Explorer running (doesn't matter if it is minimized or not).
For instance, I can play a video and move the window while the video
plays; or I can do a long directory listing in a DOS window in a
fraction of a second.

Once I start Windows or Internet Explorer, the repaint rate is painful.
When I try to move the window with the video playing, the CPU pins;
similarly for the DOS window doing a long "dir".

I've scoured ATI support and USENET, but I can't find anyone else
having this problem. I even installed a second copy of Windows on the
same machine to see if it was some softwareI installed, but the problem
is appearing on both installs of Windows.

Other applications don't seem to have the same effect as
Explorer/IExplorer -- I can run Microsoft Office apps, or other apps I
have, and things are still fast. Once I close Explorer/IExplorer,
things speed up again too. I've played with various settings in
IExplorer, but they don't seem to have an effect.

I can post more information on my hardware if that would help, but
being that this seems to be triggered by software I don't know if that
would help.

If someone could give me some insight in where to look next, it would
be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

Ken
 
If it wasn't clear, when I said "Windows or Internet Explorer", I was
referring to "Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer", not just
"Windows".

:)
 
If it wasn't clear, when I said "Windows or Internet
Explorer", I was
referring to "Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer", not just
"Windows".

:)
Click to expand...

In the old days, display properies, appearance, effects used to
have some bearing on repaint performance (and it affected apps
which used windows-scrolling). I just checked; on a slightly
slower machine than yours using XPHE-SP2, it makes virtually no
difference whether on not these items are enabled. But, you
might try turning them all off just to check? Just out of old
habit, I always turn off show content while dragging.
 
Thanks for your reply. I did try turning off all the advanced display
settings (I selected "Adjust for best performance" from the Performance
Options.) I've a lot of combinations of settings too.

I often turn off "show contents", but this problem manifests itself in
DOS windows just updating the screen (such as a long directory
listing), so it isn't just when I'm dragging a window around. It's
really quite bizarre.

Ken
 
The problem was an IE extension, Mouse Gestures. Once I removed that,
things returned to normal.
 
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