video card?

video card?

by kohl Sep 27, 2004 5:12AM PDT

My 1 year old Dell is giving me fits! It is SLOW, yes I did it all and I have adaware and spybot as well as McAfee. The windows change like you are pulling a blind up and down....SLOW! Also, when you close one window portions of that window stay on the next window or leave a white spot in that place. I have very little installed on it, I don't play games, and it is a computer are a second home with no kids on it!

Discussion is locked

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Re: video card?

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Sep 27, 2004 5:17AM PDT

Is this Windows XP?

Did it always do that?

What changed?

How much ram?

Did you flip the DMA to PIO and back?

Bob

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Re: video card?

by kohl Sep 27, 2004 5:33AM PDT

Yes, XP
No, it was ok at first and I am not sure what changed.
Sorry, don't know what the DMA and PIO is, I am not real good with all that stuff. One thing someone said to me yesterday was that I did not have enough space or something. They had me go into properties and see memeory used and said it wasn't high enough! Said I had too much on the computer. I have virtually nothing on it! It is a computer at a second home that only gets used occassionally and no kids!

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Here's the DMA article.

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Sep 27, 2004 5:38AM PDT

Notice that microsoft tells you to turn it off to turn it on! Some will "look" at the setting and not get that you can't just look.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

In closing, the usual scans with Adaware, Spybot, Stinger and Housecall.

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407

Bob

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CPU speed

by reipph Sep 29, 2004 3:50AM PDT

Kohl, you did not give details about your CPU and RAM.
RAM (SDRAM or DDRAM?) allocates space or memory reservation for various softwares running at the same time, the more applications you run at the same time, the slower will be the response, dependent upon your memory capacity, sometimes it will give like a graphical presentation effect (like powerpoint slide presentation) before the next program or application maximizes its windows, sometimes the display freezes, sometimes it leaves white spots or white square or rectangular spots in the display.
These occurs when you are running a lot of applications in the background like an anti-virus program, spyware or adware programs and you have a low RAM capacity.
Before an application runs, say MS Office, the application is filtered first thru the anti-virus, and as you go along, the anti-virus software keeps working in the background.
Did you install Ad-aware and Spybot to be launched when windows start? Dis-able it, just run the application from the desktop when you need to, leave your anti-virus software's installation as is,you need to keep it working in the background always.
Try to scan your hard disk for bad sectors by running scandisk if you have it (the scandisk application can be created by making a start-up floppy disk), it is better than checkdisk, time consuming though.
Defragment your hard disk.
Try to lower screen resolution, update video card driver.

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Re: video card?

by billv Sep 29, 2004 8:32PM PDT

I have an older Dell XPS 8400 (400 MHz P2 w/ 128MB RAM) running XP Pro that was doing the same thing. When I checked the video adapter, I discovered it was a PCI Diamond S3 with only 2 MB VRAM that was incapable of resolutions greater than 1024 x 768.

I recently bought a Princeton LCD 19D flat panel monitor with a DVI input and couldn't use it at its best resolution of 1280 x 1024 because of the S3's limitations. So tonight I installed a Radeon 9000 Pro AGP video adapter with 64 MB VRAM and my screen updates are much faster. I got the new video card on eBay for around $54 including shipping and I'm happy with the results.

I also don't have much running in the background on this PC other than Spysweeper and NAV and the XP Pro automatic update checker. Unless you're into running video-intensive games, you don't need the latest and fastest video card.

Hope this is of some use.

Bill Vee

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Slow Ride

by UnWritten7 Dec 18, 2004 4:51PM PST

I had a computer that did what you have described. It was slow as an old lady in tar. I used every kind of virus scan and adware scan but they never really removed anything for good. I got tired of it and backed up my important files and reformated my hard drive and reinstalled everything fresh like when it was new. After I did that there wasnt any freezing up or slow processing. I think you have the same problem and if you cant fix it easy spend about an hour reformatting and it will be worth it since you already are waiting an hour to boot your pc.

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