What makes hourglass icon so slow to appear

[Steve Hawkins]

Some larger programmes, particularly, Outlook, and Internet Explorer, do not
appear to respond to clicking at first. Until you learn to wait for maybe
half a minute for the hourglass icon to appear, you can be tricked into
clicking several times and ending up crashing the pc as the memory is
overloaded, or having to wait a long time for Task Manager to load so that
you can cancel the excess attempts at opening - which itself takes a long
time.

Why does the hourglass not come up straight away? It's one thing to have to
wait, but quite another not to know whether your click has worked or not,
and end up with multiple copies of programmes trying to open as a result.

Regularly scan for spyware etc, in response to other suggestions about
causes of slowness, but pc seems to keep pretty well clear of these to date.

Any thoughts or cures out there?

Regards,

Steve_H

 

[R. McCarty]

Response time has a lot of factors. Since the Disk drive is the slowest
part of any PC it needs some attention/maintenance. First, it's good to
verify the "State" of the drive (Clean/Dirty). You do this with the read
only Chkdsk command. Secondly, defragmentation will help to keep
the drive performance at it's peak level. After drive considerations, I'd
check the loading of the machine ( Physical RAM vs. Quiescent loading).
You can check this with TaskMgr. If your PC is using 312 Megabytes
and you only have 256 Megabytes of physical RAM - then the PC is
paging extensively and the slow response can be attributed to XP's
memory management (Swapping apps to Pagefile to open free space
to load the current app).
Malware can and does nick the performance, so frequent runs of tools
like Spybot & AdAware helps keep that in check.
Other things like old drivers and System errors can also hamper a PC's
performance. If the machine is an OEM (Gateway, Dell..) then it came
from the factory loaded down with "Value Added = JUNK") that could
be removed.