Tag Archives: slow

Vista: the things some people will tolerate

Computer Aid Posted on by

I’m still amazed that there are people who purchased low-end PCs when Vista was first released, and are still living in the painful world of a 512Mb Celeron running Vista.

I saw one the other day, and what should have taken me 5 minutes, took over 1 hour… and that was after I removed startup applications that didn’t need to start!

The owner was trying to use the PC to run a business, but she could only use it for a few seconds, then had to walk away, and return a few minutes later to do a few more seconds of work.

I was appalled.

Given that the PC was being leased, then I told her, she would be much, much better off returning the PC, and buying a new one. Or at lease get the leasing company to upgrade the PC.

Microsoft probably don’t realise the extent of the problems that they caused with Vista. They don’t realise that many people don’t know what the problem is, let alone how to fix it, so people will just put up with a horribly slow PC.

MYOB Premier is slow over a network

Computer Aid Posted on by

Now this was difficult to solve.

Customers’ accountant had upgraded to MYOB Premier, so that it should run over the network, and be accessed by 2 or 3 different PCs (Although it was still going to be used mainly from just 1 PC).

I get called a few weeks later, and get asked to look into the “server” because MYOB is running slow, and sometimes just wouldn’t even open the database file.

Apparently, the accountant had said she had setup MYOB Premier in many different environments, and she had never encountered any speed problems… in hindsight, I shouldn’t have trusted this nugget of useless information.

Since the server was just a windows XP home PC (but a reasonably quick Acer 3.2Ghz P4 system), I ended up doing a lot of stuffing around creating a “proper” server, only to find that the new environment had created other difficult issues (see my previous post on using linux as a file and print server).

In the end, I found a few things that resulted in a solution:

  • When MYOB starts, I changed the default protocol from NetBeui to TCP/IP (some say NetBeui is faster, but at that stage, I was willing to try anything).
  • Both the server and the main MYOB PC had Gigabit network cards, but the router ran at 100Mbit… I installed an Asus Gigabit switch between the server and the wired PC, so they would run at full Gigabit speeds.

After that, MYOB seemed to run “reasonably”, and with none of the original problems.

After some further research, I found that MYOB (probably because its not efficient at working over a network) can shuffle huge amounts of data across the network… so running Gigabit would have helped a lot.

I suspect that the amount of data transferred might be related to the size of the company database… and in this case, the company file was reasonably large (about 30 Mb).

A difficult problem to solve, and for the first time: a customer that wasn’t happy about the “size” of my invoice… But that’s another story.

Speedup Internet Explorer

Computer Aid Posted on by

If you never use internet explorer, then you probably won’t be interested in this article.

I recently noticed that my internet explorer was getting sluggish.

I did a defrag, and that helped a bit, but not much.

I started looking at the folder “temporary internet files” (c:documents and settings{username}Local SettingsTemporary Internet Files)

Hey, there’s just over 4,000 files in this folder! (Internet options -> General ->Browsing History Settings -> view files)

I had set this folder to use only 22Mb of disk space. Of course when most of the files are less than 1Kb, theoretically, I could end up with over 20,000 files in one folder.

Since I know that accessing any NTFS folder with more than 1,000 files can make your computer seem seriously slow… I decided that this needed fixing (preferably in a non-microsoft way).

cachesentry

The answer is CacheSentry.

Although its an old program, there doesn’t seem to be anything that works better.

Once installed, you encounter its one minor flaw: you cannot tell it to autostart when windows starts… you need to manually put a shortcut to it into the startup folder.

But once started, I set the max cache size to 15Mb, and the number of days before erasing unused cookies to 180 days (6 months).

It has an option to fix a bug in the IE cache size (although I don’t know if this bug is still present in ie7 and ie8 ).

But it does do a great job at deleting “stray” files (ie files that should be deleted, but internet explorer “forgets” that they exist).

After running cache sentry, I now have about 700 files in the temporary internet files folder.

And after another defragment, Internet explorer feels nice and quick.

So now, I have CacheSentry running on all my main systems.

slow intel Atom: stay away!

Computer Aid Posted on by

I saw my first intel atom computer the other day.

And it wasn’t a laptop. It was an Acer e-Machine EL1600

e-machine-el1600

At first glance, Its seemed nice: 4 front USB ports, 4 rear USB ports, a DVD-RW, a small case, XP, a small monitor was also included.

At first, I didn’t even check the CPU… I just assumed it was a celeron, a low-end pentium, or a core2 duo.

I installed it and fired it up, I went through the install process, setup the internet connection, and then installed anti-virus, etc.

But as I was configuring it, something wasn’t right.

It felt slow… sluggish.

I thought: thats unusual for a new PC running XP. It should be faster than this. I’ve got 6 year old PCs that feel faster than this.

When I saw it was an Atom CPU, then the penny dropped: I had heard that Atoms were slower than celerons, but I didn’t expect then to be this slow.

According to some people, a 1.6Ghz Atom performs like a 800Mhz celeron. Well, it certainly feels like a sub-1Ghz computer.

Some people might think its worth it for the price… But in this case: I disagree. Pay a bit extra, and you will get something (non-Atom) that is substantially, and noticeably faster.

Trend Internet Security 2009… slow

Computer Aid Posted on by

Another system rebuild, another installation of Trend Internet Security 2009…

This system is not lightning fast, but its not slow either:

Celeron 2.8Ghz, 768Mb RAM, etc

Yet TIS seems to make the PC very sluggish at normal day-to-day tasks.

I found a perfect way to test the effect: playing the game “Winterbells” from Orisinal Games

The Game would be smooth and quick before installing TIS (in fact, the game runs well on an old 600Mhz Pentium 3).

After installing TIS (with no firewall), the game would stutter every second or two.

I tried disabling the TIS “protection against web threats”… but that didn’t help either.

I uninstalled TIS 2009, installed Avira Antivir, plus installed Windows defender and spyware blaster, and Winterbells was playing as smooth as always (even while performing a microsoft update at the same time).

I did notice that TIS seemed to have a small memory footprint, but at this stage, I’d say it looks like TIS 2009 might only work well on dual core CPUs (which are not that widespread yet).

Have you had any bad experiences with Trend / other big-name security software?

netcomm nb5 slow to connect

Computer Aid Posted on by

A customer was unable to connect to the net.

He had tried to contact his ISP, and after a while on the phone, they gave up and said its a problem with his computer.

I take a look and quickly find that the ISP had gotten him to reset the netcomm nb5 back to the factory settings (so his username and password were blank).

I added the appropriate details, hit the connect button, and we could browse the net once again.

Just to be sure, I power-cycled the modem. And then it wouldn’t connect…

I connect to the modem, and I see it remembered the user account setting… but it wasn’t connected.

According to the settings, it should connect automatically.

hmmm.

customer has another (slightly different) model netcomm (still an nb5, but a smaller size).

Oddly, it seems to show similar symptoms.

By sheer accident, I discover that the modem seems to connect automatically about 5 or 10 minutes after it is restarted!

In fact, both modems seem to behave like that.

Its possible that they only connect once an attempt is made to access the internet… but I just didn’t have the time to experiment and find the exact cause.

In the future, I’ll just keep an eye out for this problem on other netcomm modems.

vista, norton, optus internet security suite 2008 = no internet and 6to4, isatap problems

Computer Aid Posted on by

Another customer calls, saying her internet mysteriously stopped working.

But only with broswing websites (page not found)… email and messenger still worked.

Its burdened with Vista and 512MB RAM… not a good start.

Soon, I see the PC is running both Norton internet security (with an expired license), and optus internet security suite 2008…

It gives a new meaning to the word “slow computer”

Since norton came with the new PC (A nasty trick, as far as I’m concerned), and once it expired, the customer installed optus ISS2008 (without removing norton first)

I spend most of the first hour trying to uninstall norton.

It got stuck right near the end, but eventually completed.

But browsing still wouldn’t work (pings work just fine)

At that point, I said: I need to work on this at the office, as there are too many possible causes, and I need to access a quick computer with internet access to fix this efficiently.

I disable the firewall, but still no browsing.

I get tired of waiting for vista, so I open up the PC, and install an extra 1GB RAM

I figure I might as well uninstall optus ISS2008, as it might somehow be blocking browsing… but I still can’t browse.

I take a look at device manager, and I see about 9 network adapters… I’m no longer sure which are real adapters, and which are used by vista as “virtual” adapters… but I see a few duplicate adapters… it looks strange, but not too concerning… after all, if they caused a problem, then they wouldn’t stop browsing only.

I do an ipconfig /all … and I’m given details on 60 network adapters :-O

Holy S… batman!

There are 43 X 6to4 adapters, and 11 X ISATAP adapters

A search on the net only shows things like “microsoft is aware of the error message… just ignore it, as it won’t affect anything”

Well I’m not buying it… it might have been caused by running 2 antivirus programs simultaneously, but I can’t leave all those adapters in place.

So I go through the registry, looking for isatap and 6to4, and find a few places where they show up. I’m careful when they show up in a group of 60 entries… So I delete almost all entries (except for the lowest number for isatap and the lowest number for 6to4.

I reboot (and cross fingers)… and vista starts without a single problem.

ipconfig looks normal, and a ping works… but still no browsing!

I install firefox and opera, but they cannot browse either.

Ordinarily, I’d say this is a firewall problem… but I’m really running out of options.

I reset the vista firewall back to default settings… still no browsing.

I remember that norton took a long time to uninstall… so I figure: maybe it didn’t fully uninstall.

So I get the latest norton removal tool, run it, and then restart the PC

Once Vista is running (more like crawling), I find I can finally browse 😀

But I’m also fuming at the piece of S… software from Symantec.

It’s now getting to the point where I sometimes have more problems with norton, as I have with infected systems… Grrr.

Vista SP1 (Service Pack 1): what you can expect (slow install)

Computer Aid Posted on by

I was working on a customers Vista PC, when it said it needed to run a windows update. I had just installed a trial version of Office 2007, So I figured it was an update to Office.

It actually turned out to be the long awaited SP1. And I sure had to wait for it to complete.

Admittedly, Vista was running on a celeron 420 (1.6 Ghz) Acer system, with 1Gb RAM.

So I found myself waiting for the download to complete… which wasn’t too bad, at, I think, 79Mb, which is considerably smaller than XP SP2 (278Mb!).

After the download, I waited 30 minutes, while it ran and installed the SP1 package.

After that, I was told vista needed to restart. I wasn’t surprised.

While shutting down, Vista showed a “shutting down” screen, saying something like: “installing updates” Stage 1 of 3… 0% complete

Stage 1 took a total of about 60 minutes… and about 15 of those minutes were spent at 68%

Stage 2 seemed to go a bit faster… with a few sudden bursts.

Since I was just glancing at the screen every once in a while, I suddenly noticed that the PC was booting… What? did I miss Stage 3? Or maybe it flashed past in just 10 seconds?

No such luck.

After the restart, vista started Stage 3, and slowly counted from 0% to 100%

All up it took about 2 or 3 hours of waiting.

My impression of SP2?

In 10 minutes of testing (not much really), it didn’t feel any faster.

Control panel took its time (as usual) to show all the icons.

Starting and stopping applications like word and outlook seemed no faster.

Starting control panel a second time was visibly faster.

The disk seemed busier (probably doing it usual background indexing for a faster search).

Starting and stopping vista didn’t seem any faster or slower.

Memory usage (from task manager) didn’t seem any different (around 550Mb in use after startup… with little else running besides antivir).

I copied a 280Mb file (disk to disk), and the copy seemed about the same speed.

I was hoping the microsoft had downplayed the performance improvements, in order to “under promise, over deliver”… but they just delivered what they said: not much.