Weird one...

[SimonGhent]

Hi folks.

I recently put together a PC for my brother with some bits I got off eBay - a 1200 Duron proc on a Compaq MoBo with built in graphics and sound running Windows ME. He pretty much uses it for surfing and a bit of word processing

It generally works fine, but some things work really slowly - for instance Spider Solitaire was painfully slow when dealing the cards - it too perhaps 30 seconds. Then one day it was running at normal speed. The only difference was that he had Internet Explorer open at the same time, logged on to the BBC CeeBeebies website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/).

Now, if he has his browser open, on this web site the PC runs fine, if IE's not open, or on a different site some things run like a dog - why???

Any ideas I'd love to hear them.

thanks folks
~~
simon

[slack]

That is weird

Hmm.....I would blame Windows ME (horrible OS lol). If you have the HDD space, it'd be worth going up to Windows 2K or XP.

Also, it could be a crap on board video card...try setting the display properties to 16 bit colour if you haven't already done so.

Cheers
John

[RoadWarrior]

Whether 16 bit is quicker or not might depend on how the GPU and DAC handle 16bit. Sometimes they can process two or four 16bit graphics "words" simultaneously, sometimes they don't. Depends on the architecture. I've met some cards that are faster in 24bit than 16.

Some likely culprits for sudden slowdowns.
Background virus checkers
MS's fastfind reindexing the files
Viruses.


Road Warrior

[SimonGhent]

I did try switching down to 256 colours, which made things a bit better, but not significantly. It's generally OK in day to day use, it was just Spider Solitaire & Freecell where it was painfully slow which I was willing to put down to the built in graphics which use system memory (there's 128Mb of that installed), but when it sped up with that specific web site I was intrigued...