geoffers,

Thank you for using the Dell Community Forum.

Make sure that the user is not using any programs that might take the bandwidth of the connection. 

That's good advice from BobT. The programs you mentioned may be involved with worm or virus activity on the machine. Take a look at ChrisRLG's "Computer Safety Online" page. Pay special attention to the sections on anti-virus and spyware/malware.

Jim

Thanks for the suggestions.   When the problem occurs no user apps are running.  I even disconnect from the network, switch of AV etc and still it is slow.  I have run the AV on the machine and it found no virus's.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks Geoffers

You said, "We have had this machine for years with no problems". Can you correlate the beginning of the problems with any changes to the machine?

I gather the machine is running NT. I found several reports of slowdowns involving services.exe and pcmapp.exe by searching with Google for pcmapp.exe. Unfortunately, none of them contained solutions.

Did you check the machine for spyware/malware? Not all programs in those classes are detected by virus scanners. Take a look with AdAware and Spybot, as described in  ChrisRLG's section on malware. Even if the machine's off the network, things may still be trying to get out.

What Service Pack's installed on the machine? NT was never very good with laptops, but things got better with later service packs. SP6a's the most recent, I think.

Jim

Hi Jim,

Thanks for your help in this it is greatly appreciated.  I am using NT4 worksation with SP6a installed.  The last thing I actually did was to take the modem out of the PCMCIA bottom slot, because it was needed on anopther Laptop..  I have suspected that this has caused the problem, but I have un-installed the modem, network card, softex driver and then re-installed all. I have reapplyed SP6a. One thing If I logon as Administrator first then as a user is OK also if I give a local user on the laptop Administrator right it works fine!! 

Thanks

Geoffers..

I found a thread in Google's cache of microsoft.public.windowsnt.misc that  describes this symptom exactly. I don't know what the person who replied means by "permissions on the laptop directory/Registry structure for that user", and there was no followup posted, unfortunately.

I wonder if the laptop BIOS version plays some role in this.

Jim