Thread: pc graphics probles...sooo slow

here's my 2 cents worth;to find out what is on your system go to run or open a cmd dos command ;type dxdiag/enter it will list in detail what kind and how much ram is on it.if you are running gimp or any graphics prog you need IMHO at least 500 meg ram (cheap these days probable dimm adding a stick is easy if you want instructions yell ok?
Keith

P.S. why is the 'General' flying through the orchard??

I suspect Cliff is spot on; not enough RAM. Especially if your gfx card uses shared RAM. 256MB is just sufficient to run Win98 or earlier; Win2K or XP really need at least double that. You haven't said what OS you're running?

Assuming your system is clean, then the next most likely causes are too small a swap file (W98 & earlier didn't auto-size on the fly) or your HDD seriously needs defragging. The easy way to tell if one of these is the cause is to wait until the system bogs down, and then check to see if the HDD is working it's little butt off. If it is, BINGO!

Under W98 I used to edit the autoexec.bat to include the line "del C:/win386.swp" to dispose of the mongrel at every boot. Under W2K I enable "clear virtual memory pagefile when system shuts down" in the Security Options of the Local Policy. It's only a matter of seconds for the system to rebuild a new, unfrag'd pagefile on reboot.

Originally Posted by Skew ChiDAMN!!

.... You haven't said what OS you're running? .....

Did too, it's Win2K.

[inserts foot in mouth...]

Originally Posted by Heilander

P.S. why is the 'General' flying through the orchard??

The boys were out doing a moonshine run when that infernally clumsy Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane spotted them and gave chase. Boss Hog has been notified.

felder has the right answer to the flying General question...


not enough ram is probably right, it started going a little wacko when i was using gimp a lot...

i did a resistry clean and cleaned old files with the CCcleaner...

i also upted the figure in the swap file, as i read this needs to be done because gimp uses a lot of vertual memory, but not sure if the numbers right, i'v been increasing it a bit here and there and feel it's help a bit...

Slowness when using virtual memory could be you HDD.

P3 256mb .... time for a update!

this is an update...my laptop blew up a xmas, and this is all i could afford at the time...


apart from this little problem, it does everything i need it to do ..

Yeah.. P3 , win2k and 256mb should work 'OK'. Well for web browsing and light graphics work anyway. Unless it's got a fault of course, a sick hard disk that has to keep retrying errors will give you a really sad PC though.

Of course the only way to really test this is to pop in another hard disk and reload windows and see if it works properly.

Having a few organ doner PCs laying around helps with the fault finding too

Cheers

Ian

Originally Posted by Ianab

...a sick hard disk that has to keep retrying errors will give you a really sad PC though.

Of course the only way to really test this is to pop in another hard disk and reload windows and see if it works properly.

Having a few organ doner PCs laying around helps with the fault finding too ...

I have a good diag that boots from a CD for testing the HDD.

hey thanks so far everyone for your replies !


i was just using gimp, and it stoped responding, i went to shut it down in the task manager and noticed the cpu usage was 100%, that explains the freeze-up, so while i had the taks manager on i went to a couple of flash sites and noticed that anything with heavy graphics would cause the cpu usage to go up to around 90%...


oh, and 2/3 of the pc is empty, so you would'nt think i'd have a problem.

you didn't say whether you had a separate graphics/video card or an onboard one also the thing that uses a virtual ram is called a swap file which could have been changed percentage wise to too small a cache (usually 10% of your hard drive) set it back to default or,since you have 2/3 of your c: drive empty ,assign 20% .but you would be better/cheaper getting a 2nd hand graphics card to take the load off your p c ram
Keith

thanks for all the tips guys...it's going a bit better now after some more cleaning and adjusting...i just make sure i don't have to many programes open at once...


much appriecated...!

La H