Yep. I've done all the following:
1. cut out all the non-vital programmes from the Windows XP boot (i.e. messengers, apps, etc.)
2. downloaded and installed the latest drivers from the relevant websites for my GFX card, my motherboard, my monitor, my soundcard and, just because I was being anal, my rather cool mouse as well; and
3. defragmented my hard drive.
There is still something seriously odd going on. For example, my computer takes a surprisingly long time to boot (5 minutes!!) even though if you watch the process monitor on XP it claims it is not doing anything (either CPU processes or accessing the hard drive). The desktop icons take ages to be updated from the "no icon picture" default to the proper icon picture.
A further example of the weirdness are these TGC website forums. They scroll really slowly. Worse, when I want to post a message, like this, it takes literally 20 seconds between when I type something to the words appearing on the screen in the post forum message box. Hence I now post from work at lunchtime because 20 seconds is an eternity. (I can only guess my 'puter has got something up with its javascript plugins but I can't isolate the problem).
However, and this is really what bugs me, if there was something really badly wrong with my puter you'd expect it to evidence it in every application it runs and for problems to appear in the device manager, etc. Yet when I check all my 'puter's stats they all come up correctly. Also, I just bought Lucasarts' Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, and that seems to run fine - no noticeable slowdown at all. WEIRD.
I'm tearing my hair out here. I've owned computers since the early 1980s and I'm very familiar with PCs yet I simply can't locate the problem. I'm vaguely wondering if it may be virus related.
Philip
PS: The only other thought that does occur is that back in the days of the dx33 and dx2 66 there was some kind of issue with the early 486 motherboards whereby if you put sim cards in the 2 open slots which cards were bigger in memory capacity than the existing two, this caused performance issues. For example, if you had two 8 meg cards in the first two slots and put two 16 meg cards in the second two slots to increase your ram from 16 meg to 48 megs, this would cause weird things to occur. Apparently, you had to put them in the other way around, big cards first. Is that still the case? If so, it might be that it is my 384 megs that is to blame. I've got two cards of 64 megs and two cards of 128 megs.
What do you mean, bears aren't supposed to wear hats and a tie?
