On 1/30/2010 3
7 AM, BillW50 wrote:
> ~misfit~ wrote on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 13:47:49 +1300:
>> Somewhere on teh intarwebs John Doue wrote:
>>> On 1/29/2010 6:05 PM, BillW50 wrote:
>>>> In news:hjukk5$dau$1@news.eternal-september.org,
>>>> John Doue typed on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 144:13 +0200:
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> I realize this is not exactly the right place to ask the question,
>>>>> but no one seems to have a clue on WindowsXP.general.
>>>>>
>>>>> On one of my machines (all have a nearly identical set-up), access
>>>>> to the Start Menu various items is often slow (several seconds),
>>>>> with hard disk activity (several seconds) before they display.
>>>>>
>>>>> Since I have 1.5 G of RAM, it is not an issue of lack of memory.
>>>>> What can I do to make XP keep in memory the Start Menu and display
>>>>> it instantly or almost, as on my other machines?
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for your pointers.
>>>> Hi John, did you ever check Task Manager and check the CPU use? And
>>>> if it goes up, see which process is causing this?
>>>>
>>>> It could be an uninstalled program that left stuff in the registry
>>>> too. And careful with registry cleaners. As they remove important
>>>> stuff if you are not careful.
>>>>
>>> Bill,
>>>
>>> No, it is trying to access the Start Menu items which causes the HD
>>> "grinding". It is obviously reading information before it can display
>>> it. IMHO, that information should be cached and not require reading
>>> each time (or most often).
>>
>> Have a read of this John:
>> http://kadaitcha.cx/performance.html#part1
>> Might be worth trying, you can always reverse it.
>
> And where I was going with this was... once we know it isn't using CPU
> usage like an antivirus, anti-spyware, or who knows what. Then I would
> flush the icon cache and perhaps the pagefile while you are at it. Say
> how large is the drive and how full is it anyway? As a nearly full drive
> will act this way too especially dealing with the swapfile.
>
> Also, I don't know how many icons you have, but Windows has a set limit.
> I don't remember, something like 400 or something for the icon cache. If
> you have more, then the hard drive has to search for anything over and
> it really gets slow looking for all of those tiny icons all over the
> drive. Thus why the icon cache was invented in the first place. The
> limit can be changed in the registry. Although I might have seen a
> setting in the System Properties too. Might have been only there in an
> earlier version.
>
Thanks Shaun and Bill for your help.
While I was waiting for it, I have changed the prefetch settings to
prefetch all and not only start-up items, thinking it could not hurt.
Well, it did not, but it seems to have solved the issue. Why and how, I
am not sure. Time will confirm, or not, this result. Just a first
impression.
I have plenty of disk space, so this was not the issue.
Following up on an obvious thing you mentioned Bill, I have increased
the icon cache ... Should have thought of it earlier. On my XP, default
is 500. I set to 2000.
Shaun, if DisablePagingExecutive is the same as Disable paging of
kernel, Xteq systems (very neat to alter settings less blindly) says no
to disable it if you use standby power functions (which I do, as most
people, I guess).
I will give some time to my machine to confirm the problem is solved. If
it proves to be, I will try disabling prefetch for programs to see if
the change in icon cache is actually sufficient. And if the problem
reappears, I will following Bill suggestion to check CPU usage, at first
I had not seen the point, now I do! Jetlag certainly (just flew from
Home Florida to Finland).
Thank you both for your kind help!
--
John Doue
