VERY slow performance; something running in the background?

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Guest

When I fire up my laptop, everything seems fine, but the cursor, instead of being just an arrow, alternates between arrow and arrow-with-hourglass. Sometimes a small window labelled "autoplay" will appear briefly on the screen. When I connect to the internet (dial-up), the connection speed is about half of a normal connection. I know the problem is in the laptop because I have a desktop with XP that connects just fine. I've defragged, run disc cleanup, and cursed. No improvement. PLEASE HELP before I put a fist through the screen or the laptop through a window!
 
Hi you did not mention how many megs of ram you are running in your laptop?
you probably know but the least amount you should have going is 128 megs but I have had people running 256 megs and haveing problems so I usualy sudgest 512 megs to be safe.
Now as for your aouto play screen do oyu have a dvd drive in your lap top?
if so go through your preferences and make sure it is not kicking on when windows boots or when you download a web video.
If that doesnt work you can always uninstall the drive itself and reinstall this normally takes care of all problems.
another thing is to make sure in your settings you do not have your computter looking for the disk drives evey now and then.
This will eat up ram and can cause temporay activation in the drives.
Also get a fire wall!!!
never leave out the possiblity that someone or another computer is actully useing your computer and rescourses for it's own use and you not even know it.
Hope these things help.
 
As has been said make sure you don't have a disc in drive also run adaware
spyware takes lots of cpu cycles also update AV software and run a full scan
in safe mode. Also does computer run slow in safe mode?

FWIW I have 256 mb of ram and computer works fine for normal stuff

Wayne

forex bob said:
When I fire up my laptop, everything seems fine, but the cursor, instead
Click to expand...
of being just an arrow, alternates between arrow and arrow-with-hourglass.
Sometimes a small window labelled "autoplay" will appear briefly on the
screen. When I connect to the internet (dial-up), the connection speed is
about half of a normal connection. I know the problem is in the laptop
because I have a desktop with XP that connects just fine. I've defragged,
run disc cleanup, and cursed. No improvement. PLEASE HELP before I put a
fist through the screen or the laptop through a window!
 
Thanks, hobotec. I have 512 megs, a firewall, and AV software. It turns out, though, that I also had a card from our digital camera in the drive. Taking that out seems to have cleared up the autoplay problem. However, my dial-up connection is still running at about half speed, while my desktop is still able to connect at normal speed (same ISP). Any thoughts?

----- hobotec wrote: -----

Hi you did not mention how many megs of ram you are running in your laptop?
you probably know but the least amount you should have going is 128 megs but I have had people running 256 megs and haveing problems so I usualy sudgest 512 megs to be safe.
Now as for your aouto play screen do oyu have a dvd drive in your lap top?
if so go through your preferences and make sure it is not kicking on when windows boots or when you download a web video.
If that doesnt work you can always uninstall the drive itself and reinstall this normally takes care of all problems.
another thing is to make sure in your settings you do not have your computter looking for the disk drives evey now and then.
This will eat up ram and can cause temporay activation in the drives.
Also get a fire wall!!!
never leave out the possiblity that someone or another computer is actully useing your computer and rescourses for it's own use and you not even know it.
Hope these things help.
 
Hi, I have the same arrow/arrow with a hourglass problem, and I have problems with dialup internet access speeds also, I found a Windows service which causes the arrow problem, but I do not know he exact english name of it because I have a Hungarian XP, the name of the service can be something like 'Shell hardware detection', after I turned it off the arrow symphtom disappeared, but I do not know what will go wrong as I turned it off.
Peter
 
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