Slowdown for no good reason!

[KeithKosh]

This is annoying. I have a computer new as of last fall. Windows ME and a Cable Modem. Now, the problem is slowdown! I posted before about how IE would sometimes lag for about a second after I click on a link, during which the computer would basically sit there, and then make the click noise and go as if there was never a problem. Well, it's also reared its ugly head into other applications, mostly everything in fact. It only seems to be a factor after the computer has been running for a while?! Because when I reboot, and then try some stuff, there is none of this lag or slowdown, ever. But after a while, I'm doing something for example, like playing a MIDI song in windows media player, and in random points through the song, it'll lag for a split second, enough to disrupt the music. Absoulutely no reason to lag when it does. When playing multiplayer games online, this lag ain't so fun, especially playing Midtown Madness 2! ;)

I have cleaned out my computer with Ad-Aware. I have Norton Antivirus, Auto-Protect in fact...I disabled it once to see if that was the problem, but there was still lag. I have a Ton of programs running when I hit Control-Alt-Delete...my theory is that it has to be one of them. But there's so many I wouldn't know where to start. Maybe it's something else. At any rate, any help would be wonderful. Thanks.

Keith

[I_let_the_smoke_out]

Hey Keith,
Have you tried emptying your temporary internet files? Also, defragging the hard drive might not be a bad idea if you haven't done that yet.
Give it a try and let me know.

[Cricket]

Hi KeithKosh,

Having a lot of programs running in background can slow your system down. You could try disabling them all except Explorer and Systray and then slowly enable one at a time until the problem returns.

Isolate your system from the internet (disconnect the cable modem) so you don't have to worry about hackers, viruses and trojans while you're doing this.

Here's a list of startup programs, could help you determine what is what: Startup Application List (http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_pages/startup_full.htm)

:) Cricket

[Nuclear Krusader]

You don't happen to have KaZaa installed in this machine, do you?

[tx2Step]

Cricket is right, try not having so many things in startup. I got rid of everything that ran at startup even tho I have 512 megs of ram because of a similar problem. Also you might want to try setting your min and max cache in vcache and make sure it's set right. You can find lost of info on proper settings for your computer online. Mine has chunksize=512 and by keeping the min and max the same and low I eliminated the lag problem. Mine is set at 16384, which is meant to not allow windows to hog so much cache strength.

you should weekly remove all temp files not just temporary internet files (c:\windows\temp\ or wherever you have them set), do scandisk and defrag, I have found that with a big hard drive and faster processor that this really helps. My old computer was a dink with little in the way of ram or anything else and a small hard drive and it didn't suffer the pangs of my big box. Hardly ever needed any maintenance but of course it didn't pull the juice this heavy hitter does.

Texas2step

[galaxian]

If you are running Win98, setting a cap on vcache is a guarantee to slow performance. 16MBs is way way too low. Especially when you have so much ram installed. I would be willing to bet that you always have memory available. Remember, free ram is wasted ram.
vcache was an issue on win95 but should not be of any concern on win98 until you get above 512.