Does this happen to you???

[pyrate83]

Anybody ever experience some computer slow-down mainly just the speed your files are accessed from the HDD. This seems to occur to me now after I have ripped movies for hours on my computer. I also have about 6GB in videos and music on this HDD. Is this normal or am I just imagining things????

[tgpo]

I've never experienced anything like you've said. Usually the only slowdown comes when the computer is hitting the HD for a sec and once it finishes it goes back to normal.

I hate this G3 keyboard!!!! No delete key, only backspace!!!

[i_am_dave]

I've seen Windows 95 do that before. Is it possible that your virus scanner is kicking in?

[Solarjetman]

Well, you could try defraging your hard drive.

Or, threaten the computer loudly as if you were an iron fist dictator.

I think my first idea may work better though

[obiron]

pyrate83

Accoding to your system info, you have WinXp. You might check to see if you have indexing turned on. Right click your drive in My Computer and select properties. At the bottom there should be a check box indicating you want indexing or not. Indexing can slow down disk responses. You really don't need it unless you are part of an Active Directory network or you want future searches to be faster. Just a thought.

[pyrate83]

Thanks a lot...except for the iron fist thing.

[EddyH]

its a memory leak you use a program that handles it's memory badly (there's an utterly disgraceful amount of windows programs fall under that category) and, either continually, or every time you restart it / one of it's processes, you lose some of your RAM for the rest of the sesh. eventually there'll be too much tied up to not need something swapped to virtual mem and your PC will start to 'chew' the hard disc.

three solutions:

1. a decent memory manager / recovery program. if you don't mind a time-delay nag messagebox, the free version of Powerstrip www.entech.tw has one built in. Not a great one mind (the automatic trigger is a bit insensitive), but if you resign to clicking the button every couple hours and waiting a minute or so, you can add days to your uptime / high-speed period.

2. add more RAM even an inefficient program has trouble filling a whole gig.

3. save everything and resign yourself to a reboot


or secret answer 5 - get more efficient programs. no, dont ask me which ones, i dont know. thats why its secret.


as well as encoders (eg - latest version of TMPG ), certain... erm... 'networking utilities' are also complete b*$tards for this problem, but of course, they dont get optimised that much.. they'll eat your ram, slow your programs, and knacker your hard disc. call it a peteypee tax.

[pyrate83]

Well I hope the Gig of RAM I have right now is sufficient for running everything...in fact I know it is. But I have to agree that it just seems that after I use DVD decryptor, DVD2ONE, and DVDShrink my system seems to respond slowly for a bit but then is much better after those programs have been closed.

But thanks, I shall make sure I know which of the programs seems to be the most inefficient.

[Will Hay]

Well, you could try defraging your hard drive.

Yup, I'd second that.
Will

[EddyH]

maybe i spoke too soon on the filling-a-gig front perhaps its that some programs just expand to fill the available space.
so far never had an out-of-memory error with RAM+Swap = 1gb though... hmm. (1 PC, 448 + 576; another, 256 + 768).

to third will and solar - at least a fortnightly defrag is essential in this day and age. used to be just a hackery thing to keep your PC fully leet, when it took about 5 minutes to fully optimise a 500mb disc. now its a definate helper... trouble is with a disc >20gb you'll probably want to have it run overnight! (ditto surface-scanning with Scandisk. used to take next to no time. now it's *hours* )

[pyrate83]

Yeah but with XP you really don't have to run scandisk very much and even when I have run it....I haven't encoutered any errors or anything so it almost seems pointless to run. I don't know, defragging the HDD is a must but scandisk, I'm not so sure about anymore.

[CPimaging]

Your computer needs time to rest after doing video related things, especially if you don't have the fastest machine. I've found that these things help:

-turn off computer for a few minutes
-defrag hard drive
-run a disc clean up
-make sure you don't have unnessesary programs running in the background

The main thing is to let it rest, turned off.