The machine is running very slowly, it's not even keeping up with my typing, what should I do?
There are various reasons why your Thick Client NT machine might be running slowly.
- Your PC may be running low on either processor power or memory.
- To find out if this is the case, right click on an empty area of the taskbar, to produce the following menu:
- Left-click on Task Manager... to bring up the Task Manager:
- Click on the Performance tab:
- If the CPU (processor) and MEM (memory) usage meters are high, or the amount of Physical Memory Available is low then it is likely that your machine will be running slowly. In the example above, the processor is currently very lightly loaded, although there were recently some more active moments.
- The memory usage is fairly low too, with about half the RAM fitted in the machine still unused. When the MEM Usage is above the Physical Memory Total, Windows NT starts to move information from chunks of the RAM onto the harddisc. The harddisc is much slower to read from and write to than the RAM and so this can also cause the machine to slow down. Closing applications/files will free up memory, and also lighten the load on the processor. Things like creating and extracting Zip files and playing & recording video/audio will all use lots of processor power, and slow the machine down.
