exasperating slowdowns

[jepeters]

My school bought some 1.8 Ghz Celerons (windows XP) this summer to be used by teachers. One teacher kept complaining that her computer would get really slow, but whenever I worked on it, it was fine. Finally, today, it happened while I was in her room to see it for myself.

It was working fine, then she started up Word and it took about 10 seconds or more to load (normally it's about 2). We exited out and tried it again--same thing. A while back she told me that it would sometimes take 2 minutes (might be a bit of an exaggeration there) to close a Word file that's stored on the server.

I logged her off the machine, then logged in as myself, and then it was back to normal speed. I also logged in as a student and had normal speed.

What could be causing this? It IS connected to an NT network, and several times the slowdown has occurred when she is accessing the school announcements from the server. But when we're just starting up Word with a new file, it's obviously not accessing the network at all.

[beckx020]

I don't know enough about Word to help there. Problems on the network or her system can cause long pauses/freezes like this. She doesn't have to be trying to get anything on the network.

To try to see if it's her system or wiring, could you take the machine to another room where they don't have this problem, and run it long enough to see if it pauses? If so, it's probably something in the system itself. If not, can you take a machine that doesn't have the pausing problem to her room and see if it has the problem?

None of that solves the problem, but if you don't have tools available to you, it might help find which part the problem is in.

[jepeters]

she has a 2nd network drop in the room, so i was going to have her connect through that, but then when I realized that just starting up Word caused such a delay, I figured it must be a problem within the machine itself (earlier she had only told me that it was slow when getting the daily announcements from the network server).

It's such a hit-and-miss situation, I was checking it out several times over the weekend and never had a single slowdown. So, to take it out of her room for a while might end up being quite a while before it even showed any signs of slowing down. I haven't talked to her yet today to see how it has gone or if it helps to log out and log back in again.

[beckx020]

I thought of something else, and that's the windows prefetch folder. I believe this is supposed to help loading things faster. However, I find that an empty one works better for me. The prefetch folder is under the windows directory in XP.

This is my del_pre.bat that I have on my desktop. I always run it before bringing up outlook or my browser.

cd c:\windows\prefetch
del *.pf

Look in the windows\prefetch folder to see if you can figure out which one is for Word. Then replace the "*.pf" above and with whatever the word .pf is (i.e. word*.pf). When she has this pause in word, have her close word, then run the bat file to remove the prefetch, and restart word. You said it would happen over and over with word, so that might tell you if it's prefetch causing the problems.

Also make sure that she keeps her temp internet files purged.