Number 199 - December 1999

Why My 450 MHz Pentium III Ran So Slowly and What Cured the Problem
by Bob Thomson, Tacoma Open Group for Microcompuers
As our friend and TOG member, the late Jim Cooke used to say: "We are all beginners at something." He was right! I came late to Windows 95. To prove my point, by the time I loaded it on a machine it was Windows 98! So I am a beginner of sorts in the trials and tribulations of running Win9x programs. I have been enjoying my 450 MHz Pentium III machine and gleefully surfing the 'Net with my cable modem, downloading programs and running them on my nice, responsive machine--what we used to call a screamer. But recently it has started to slow down. Screen displays were jerky and mouse movements slow to respond. Why?     At the bottom of the screen, on the right hand side is the System Tray where a number of icons reside for programs which, when they do run, run in the background. I have "resident" in my System Tray, for example, a Task Scheduler which periodically, on schedule, runs disk maintenance programs, the Norton Antivirus program which periodically, every week or so, runs Virus checks, the SETI space radio signal analysis program which runs continuously. Through the months, without prompting from me, some of the programs I have downloaded and installed have placed icons in the System Tray to start them up automatically on demand.     When I asked fellow TOG members why the system is slowing down, Dave Rowe came up with the answer. "It sounds like you have too many programs running." He didn't say it, but he meant "in the background". One of the features of the Windows 9.x operating system is that it can do multitasking. That means two or more programs can be running at the same time, using memory and sharing CPU (processor) time.	What Dave Rowe meant was that these programs may be running concurrently, in the background, and using up these system resources without me even knowing about it. If "too many" programs are loaded and running concurrently, your system cannot respond as quickly as it did before they were loaded.     As the warden in the movie Cool Hand Luke said: "What we have here is a failure to communicate!"--a semantic problem. When a program icon is "resident" in the System Tray, my assumption has been that, except in a couple of cases, such as the SETI program, these programs are not doing anything--hence are not using system resources. WRONG!     What I think is happening is, that while the programs themselves may not be running, the operating system is continually "polling" the icons in the System Tray to check each program's status and to see if a command has been given to "run" the program. This continual polling uses resources and if enough of it is going on, the system slows down to accommodate this activity. The Fix Is In     If you right click on the icons in the System Tray most will display a drop-down menu which will give you the option to Close or Exit. Clicking on this option removes the icon from the System Tray but leaves it on the screen desktop. Removing most of these program icons from the System Tray restored the responsiveness to my system. I left the Task Scheduler, Norton Antivirus and SETI Analysis there, but deleted the others. Launching them from an icon on the screen, when I want to use them, is sufficient to my needs.
Number 199 - December 1999