General System Performance Questions/Issues

[John C Harris]

I have a DeLL XPS Pentium 1.83 Gig with 2 Gig RAM and ATI Radeon 256 MB
card.

Initially had XP Home on it and upgraded to VISTA Home Premium.

Have generally had few issues but lately my system has been peaking out and
hanging for about two minutes intermittently. I have turned off Indexing,
thinking it was that, but no help. It usually happens when opening email in
Outlook 2007 or while browsing using IE 7.

I have tried to make notes on when it hangs but there seems to be no rhyme
of reason to it. I have enough RAM and a big enough Video Card so I am at a
loss about what is happening. Has any seen this and are there any ideas you
could offer? I have also checked the performance meter and tracking but it
is showing no issues.

Thanks in Advance

- John

 

[Kerry Brown]

In the Start Search box type Performance, and double click on Performance
Information and Tools in the results list. Click on Advanced Tools. Work
through the tools to see what is causing the poor performance.

 

[Guest]

--

At 180 GBs you're on the low side. As a start, go in Control Panel to
"Performance Information and Tools" and check " Base Score". My Vista with
236 GBs scores at a paultry 2.0 - totally inadequite for Aero (for example).
Then click computer and check HD usage. System Restore will use about 27 GBs
(15% of total 180) and this has caused problems for some. Mine was up to 35
GBs but I got it down to 10. Don't disable SR as you will most likely need
it. Wayne



Wayne L.

 

[John Barnes]

I agree. When I had a 3500+ I was also having hangs, etc. after upgrading
to a 5200+ x2 these were mostly gone. To get rid of the rest of the
problem I had to manually set the affinity of several running processes to
one of the cpu's. Using the performance tools as suggested by Kerry should
help you identify your problem.

 

[John C Harris]

My base score is a 4.2 so I SHOULD be good. Went into the performance and
the only thing that hinted at a problem was a shell error at one point when
I KNOW it was hanging, but there is nothing there as how to resolve it. Just
to be certain I went ahead and disabled the aero stuff and watching it now
to see what happens.

The "180 Gigs you are referring to sounds like Hard Drive size. I was
referring to my processor.

 

[John C Harris]

Do you think I need to upgrade my processor? How/where do I find what my
system can handle? Would DeLL possibly know?

I am thinking this is what I need to do but never done that before so need
to be careful

 

[Kerry Brown]

My base score is a 4.2 so I SHOULD be good. Went into the performance and
the only thing that hinted at a problem was a shell error at one point
when I KNOW it was hanging, but there is nothing there as how to resolve
it. Just to be certain I went ahead and disabled the aero stuff and
watching it now to see what happens.

Did you click on "View Performance details in Event log"? Go through the log
and look for Event ID's in the 400's and 500's.