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dlslater

3 Posts

11311

August 27th, 2005 19:00

AOL CPU usage problem

I just bought an Inspiron 6000.  It has AOL 9.0 Optimized SE on it.  Whenever I logon to AOL, my laptop comes to a grinding halt.  CPU usage jumps up to almost 100%.   It will be OK for a period and then use all CPU cycles again.  I've always been an AOL user and have no problems with it like this on my other Dell computers (including my old Inspiron 8100 and Dimension 2400).
 
AOL is the only application that has these performance problems.  Other internet applications (Outlook, IE, Webcam software, Yahoo Messenger) have no problems.  I use DSL.
 
My hardware is: 1G of RAM, 2GHz Pentium M processor, 80G hard drive (with almost 50G of free space).
 
Anyone have any suggestions for things to try?  I'm going to try to check with AOL too but it takes forever due to my problem.

RoadiJeff

1.2K Posts

August 28th, 2005 02:00

Are you sure it's not running the AOL spyware utility or downloading an update to something as soon as you establish an Internet connection via AOL?  That's been the case sometimes when I log on using AOL. You might check and see what program is using so much resources, if it's not the main AOL program itself. The AOL spyware utility really slows mine down when it does its automated scans..

 

 

dlslater

3 Posts

August 28th, 2005 18:00

It was originally always WAOL.EXE that was the CPU hog.  I tried upgrading to the latest version of AOL (9.0 Security Edition SE) and then it was always something called PortAOL.EXE that was the culprit.  I spent lots of time with AOL's "Live Help" last night and tried many different things.  Nothing helped.
 
I have now completely uninstalled AOL and I'm going to try installing from an AOL CD that I have (it's version 9.0 Optimized).  Before I do the reinstall, I wanted to completely purge any references to AOL from the Windows registry.  AOL leaves lots of "stuff" in the registry after an uninstall.  I've just about completed the AOL purge.  Hopefully a complete install will cleanup whatever the cuplrit was.
 
I've run spyware checks, virus checks and defragged the hard disk.  Not sure what else to try before reinstalling.  That's everything that I can think of.

dlslater

3 Posts

September 10th, 2005 23:00

I uninstalled AOL and purged all traces of AOL from the registry.  I then reinstalled version 9.0 SE optimized...same problem.  I guess I'm going to have to try AOL support again.  I may also try running some of the Microsoft support tools to see if they can find anything set incorrectly on my laptop...page file settings, network settings, etc.  Everything else works fine...only AOL software has the problem.

I played with the Performance admin tool in XP.  Something that seems strange is that when the problem happens, AOL is using a very high percentage of "% Privileged Time"...not of "% User Time".  From what I've read about these stats, it seems that AOL is doing something at the OS (XP) level when the problem occurs.  I've looked on some XP forums also and haven't been able to find anything.

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