periodic pausing

[Guest]

On our Windows XP Professional, applications such as Word, Explorer and
Outlook Express have started suffering from a strange regular screen
'glitch'. It happens every eight to 10 seconds. The effect with Word, for
example, is that the cursor turns into the hourglass icon and the ruler takes
on a solid grey appearance (just in the top corner) for about one second. I
suspected it may have been some automatic or scheduled function that we'd
inadvertantly enabled with an accidental key combination, but haven't been
able to nail it down. Can anyone help?

 

[DatabaseBen]

as simple as the problem sounds and what
the cause may be, its like a needle in a hay stack.

it sounds like a process has started that is
taking memory and or cpu power from
your programs. it can even be
a fragmented disk. it may even be
somekind of spyware trying to transmit
something as well.......

restoring your system to a safe point
will help. then see if your problem
is also encountered in safe mode. if so:

check and remove useless startups that
are running but you really do not need.
go to msconfig via run and disable everything,
reboot and check for the problem. if
resolved, then re-enable the startups
that you need preinstalled when windows run, one
at a time as one of them can be the problem.

next, check your swap file/virtual memory size.
if its set to auto then set it to manual for a min
of 2 and max of 1152. Reboot and check
for the problem.

there is a couple of other checks. but the
above are basically what can get
inadvertently altered..

 

[Guest]

thanks DatabaseBen.. i've taken it back, as you suggested, to a safe point
(sep 1), which appears to have eliminated the problem. i assume i simply
leave it at that safe point, and carry on as normal? unfortuately, working
out how to carry out the retore process stretched the boundaries of my
computer expertise! thanks again.

 

[DatabaseBen]

maybe you should make a restore point for today. that way you
can avoid an accidental restorations that may have integrated that
problem in a previous restore point from today's.


....glad to have helped.

 

[Rock]

On our Windows XP Professional, applications such as Word, Explorer and
Outlook Express have started suffering from a strange regular screen
'glitch'. It happens every eight to 10 seconds. The effect with Word, for
example, is that the cursor turns into the hourglass icon and the ruler
takes
on a solid grey appearance (just in the top corner) for about one second.
I
suspected it may have been some automatic or scheduled function that we'd
inadvertantly enabled with an accidental key combination, but haven't been
able to nail it down. Can anyone help?

One option is to have task manager open and see what runs when the pause
occurs. Another option is to use process explorer which gives more
information than task manager.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html