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Don Basilio
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« on: 12:16:46, 02-08-2008 » |
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... particularly in the first hour after turning them on.
I point at something and click, and nothing appears to happen. I don't get an egg timer or anything. Then after five minutes, I may get a response, but I will have done other clicks in the meantime.
And all the progs open on the machine do not always appear on the line at the bottom. Sometimes they just disappear, without being told to close.
Any suggestions?
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« Last Edit: 13:22:48, 07-08-2008 by Don Basilio »
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To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn, and a time to dance
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John W
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« Reply #1 on: 12:34:47, 02-08-2008 » |
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Hi Don,
Some possibilities:
If you are on-line at the time then your anti-virus or security programes may be updating in the background, Norton does that without telling me, also some Windows updates can be downloading that you may be unaware of.
Also system scans may be scheduled, or behind schedule, and start up when you've switched on.
John
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Kittybriton
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« Reply #2 on: 13:04:12, 02-08-2008 » |
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How much space do you have on the hard disks of the troubled machines? We have a similar problem here, and one of the reasons I loathe, despise and detest Windoze is its voracious appetite for resources. If your hard disks are more than 75% full you may notice an improvement by - clearing some space
- adding another hard drive
(both things which are planned for the vague and nebulous future here when a rich uncle expires) |
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Click me -> About meor me -> my handmade storeNo, I'm not a complete idiot. I'm only a halfwit. In fact I'm actually a catfish. |
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Andy D
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« Reply #3 on: 18:29:32, 02-08-2008 » |
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... particularly in the first hour after turning them on.
They sound a bit like me in the morning  You might have some nasties on your machines which are hogging all the resources. How confident are you that you have Windows patched up-to-date, you haven't been infected by spyware/adware/trojans etc - what sort of protection do you use? An unpatched, unprotected Windows machine is supposed to grind to a complete halt within a very short time. Even if you haven't got any nasties, you might have benign programs running which you're not really interested in - do you know what programs are on your start-up list? Lots of progs that you install start something running when you boot up - nearly all of them are not required. I do occasionally find that running progs don't appear in the bar at the bottom - try ALT+TAB which should give you all programs running. |
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Michael
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« Reply #4 on: 15:29:28, 04-08-2008 » |
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If you haven't done a defrag in a while, this too can speed things up.
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Philidor
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« Reply #5 on: 17:54:03, 04-08-2008 » |
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Don,
How many firewalls, anti-virus and anti-spyware programmes are you running? A common problem is people running Norton, AVG, whatever, but also have windows firewall switched on. Result: the data must fight its way through two firewalls and the machine slows by 50%. If it's a more serious problem, e.g. spywear, I may be able to help. Are you getting lots of pop-ups?
Philidor
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Ron Dough
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« Reply #6 on: 17:59:18, 04-08-2008 » |
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....spywear.....
Philidor
 The tie that Bonds....? |
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« Last Edit: 18:04:42, 04-08-2008 by Ron Dough »
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Philidor
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« Reply #7 on: 21:34:03, 04-08-2008 » |
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* hangs head in shame *
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Don Basilio
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« Reply #8 on: 21:19:12, 05-08-2008 » |
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I will check the proggies on my machine tomorrow. Thank you everyone for contributions. Tonight it took over 30 minutes to get my new emails and this page to open.
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To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn, and a time to dance
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Don Basilio
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« Reply #9 on: 15:16:54, 06-08-2008 » |
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Windows Firewall is turned off. I am running Speed Disk on the laptop at the moment. In 3 hours it has done about 15%.
Sancho tells me he gets non-online programmes to work quicker when the router is off.
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To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn, and a time to dance
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Don Basilio
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« Reply #10 on: 15:18:39, 06-08-2008 » |
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Are you getting lots of pop-ups?
Philidor
Reckon myself lucky to get sweet Fanny Adams, at times. |
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To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn, and a time to dance
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...trj...
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« Reply #11 on: 15:40:09, 06-08-2008 » |
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An unpatched, unprotected Windows machine is supposed to grind to a complete halt within a very short time.
This might be the received wisdom, but a year or so ago I thought I'd better update our household PC's virus protection. So I invested in whatever the latest Norton was - and only then did it grind to an absolute halt. After 5 hours of scanning our harddrive it found exactly 0 viruses, malware and spyware - this is after two or three years of unprotected surfing. So I uninstalled the damn Norton, cursed the £90 I'd wasted and carried on as usual. |
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Andy D
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« Reply #12 on: 16:06:47, 06-08-2008 » |
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I agree about an anti-virus program not really being necessary trj (especially Norton as I had lots of wasted effort as a result of using it). I'd be quite happy to have no AV on my machine as I'm the only person who uses it, I don't go onto dodgy sites (not intentionally anyway  ) and I'm never likely to open an attachment saying "Paris Hilton does something or other". A 2-way firewall is essential (ie not the Windows one), keep Windows patched up-to-date and use a secure browser - I use Firefox with Javascript and Flash blocked by default, except for a few well-trusted sites. It can be a bit of a pain at times, but I want to control what runs here. Any file I download will be saved, never executed. I do run avast (AV) as a resident and Spybot, AVG and AdAware on an adhoc basis but they never find anything significant, which either means they're no good or there's nothing there. I've been using the Spybot resident called Teatimer which monitors any changes to the registry - this is quite useful as most nasties modify the registry to enable them to start at boot up. However it's quite expensive in terms of memory usage so I'm thinking about possibly getting rid of it. Spybot itself has a very useful facility which enables you easily to check/amend the processes that start with the machine - as I said before, most of these are not required and just hog resources - or they're nasties! |
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Don Basilio
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« Reply #13 on: 17:35:20, 06-08-2008 » |
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The pc installed a browzer called "Safari" when it was updating something recently. I am using it at the moment, and it is going at a decent pace, for the first time with anything today.
What is a patch?
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To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
A time to weep, and a time to laugh: a time to mourn, and a time to dance
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Morticia
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« Reply #14 on: 17:42:16, 06-08-2008 » |
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An unpatched, unprotected Windows machine is supposed to grind to a complete halt within a very short time.
This might be the received wisdom, but a year or so ago I thought I'd better update our household PC's virus protection. So I invested in whatever the latest Norton was - and only then did it grind to an absolute halt. After 5 hours of scanning our harddrive it found exactly 0 viruses, malware and spyware - this is after two or three years of unprotected surfing. So I uninstalled the damn Norton, cursed the £90 I'd wasted and carried on as usual. I've just had my annual Reminder message from Norton telling me that I am about to be vulnerable to all manner of cyber nasties if I do't renew my subscription with them. I haven't had a problem with Norton, although it does seem to be very slow when scanning for problems and then the computer is effectively out of action while the scan takes place  |
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