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Win2k "pausing" after minimizing/closing any application

F

FuzBox

Junior Member
Hi,

I just got a new setup: 900Mhz Athlon, MSI k7TPro2A mobo, 256 megs of mem, Maxtor ATA100 HD, basically a pretty decent rig. However in Windows 2000 whenever I minimize or close an application my system "pauses" for a couple of seconds, basically I can't click anything and in some cases the cursor won't even move.
The pause is longer with larger applications. For example, the pause is barely noticeable with IE, but if I open a large image in Photoshop and then when exit or minimize, the pause can be up to 20 seconds long where the computer won't respond to anything.
I opened task manager and monitored the memory usage: there's always free physical RAM, but the cpu ussage gets pegged at 100%.
Does anyone have any idea why this is happening and even better, how I can fix it? I also have Win98 on my machine and I don't have the same problem there at all. (Could it perhaps have something to do with my hard drive being partitioned and having two OS's?
One more thing: at first I was using the sound card built into the mobo, but my music would stutter and skip whenever I opened or closed any application. So I baught a SB Live and the problem almost went away - it only stutters when I shut down a large app like photoshop.

Thanks in advance for any help.
 
Check your ide controllers in device manager and see if you have dma enabled for your hardrive, I'm assunming you have properly installed the via 4in1 drivers. Your system is similar to mine, and I don't experience that at all. Your 100% cpu usage does sound like the via 4in1's however(I usually run at 0-1% cpu at idle)Also check to see if you aren't scanning with your virus scanner all the time.
 
Do you have a virus protection program installed???. I've found that with AVP a had to deselect a function where it scanned compressed programs and files. After that it stoped. I know McF and Norton have the same options somewhere. Try that 🙂.

AoD 😉
 
I actually had the same problem... it turned out to be a printer driver that was causing the problem (HP P1100). Are all of your drivers golden?

 
Hi,
Unfortunately nothing's worked so far. I've twiddled with the bios, removed all my printers, made sure DMA support was enabled, but the problem still persists. I also installed the latest 4in1 driver from VIA but that didn't do anything either.
I can't say for sure, but it seems like the pause comes when win2k is unloading something out of memory, but I can't imagine why that would be a slow process. Or my guess could be completely wrong.
Anything I'm forgetting to check?

Another thing I've noticed is that while working in photshop, if I'm working with a very large image there's a several second pause if I hold down the paintbrush or any other tool for more than 5 seconds or so. It seems that the process of putting the actions into history memory takes a long time even though I always have at least 30megs of free RAM. I can understand if that's a problem with photoshop, but the other pausing happens with all applications.

Thank you again
 
Are you using a USB mouse, perhaps your mouse drivers are causing trouble. Take alook in event viewer..are you seeing any weird errors in there. Look at your processes in task manager, is something using more than its share cpu or memory resources. How about a nic or cd burner?
 
Problem solved!
It turned out that win2000 was running my HD in PIO mode. All I had to do was install the ATA100 hotfix from microsoft and it's all good now.
Thanks for your suggestions
 
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