crab apple,

Thank you for using the Dell Community Forum.

You say there is a delay in opening up programs?  You may want to first get rid of some of these utiltity programs listed in your post. I believe that once you uninstall most of those programs your system will work just fine. When you open email these programs are checking all the email coming in to your inbox causing the delay.

Hi

Thank you for your response.  I have removed all the utilities except Zone Alarm and there is no improvement.  I have all those utilities because of getting Trojan Vundo a few years ago and now I try to keep my computer ultra protected and clean at all times.

This weekend I will remove Zone Alarm as I'm getting the impression that is the cause of the delay, unless you have any other suggestions.  The computer doesn't make noises as though it is working during these delay times.  It is as if the message isn't getting through for 50 seconds, then, when it does, Zone Alarm starts working and finally the program opens.  Also, the problem is intermittent.

Thanks for your help. 

Crab Apple.

How much memory does your computer have?  How big is the pagefile (swap file)?  How much free disk space do you have in C:?  Depending on what all is running on your computer any of these being "low" could cause the slow down you describe.

Hi Thank you for your response.  I have removed all the utilities except Zone Alarm and there is no improvement.  I have all those utilities because of getting Trojan Vundo a few years ago and now I try to keep my computer ultra protected and clean at all times. This weekend I will remove Zone Alarm as I'm getting the impression that is the cause of the delay, unless you have any other suggestions.  The computer doesn't make noises as though it is working during these delay times.  It is as if the message isn't getting through for 50 seconds, then, when it does, Zone Alarm starts working and finally the program opens.  Also, the problem is intermittent. Thanks for your help.  Crab Apple.

Do you get the error message "Internet Explorer can not display this webpage"? I'm having simular problems. But my PC "Dell Inspiron 530" is less than a week old and has been doing it since I got it.

Dell won't help me with it.

Hi Larry R

The computer has 512 MB Ram.  Total paging file size for all drives is 768MB ( I didn't know what this was, but now I do - thanks.)  Total size of C: is 229 GB with free space of 132GB.  How does that sound for just opening an internal document, or connecting to e-mail, or just to the internet?

Thanks
Crab Apple.

Hi mkfarnam

No, I don't get this message.  I'm not able to help you with this problem.  Perhaps you should start a new thread so that someone more knowledgeable can offer suggestions.

Crab Apple

Personally I'd increase paging file size to 1024 (or even 2048) MB, however, the 768 MB you have now should be sufficient.  You got way more than enough disk space that that isn't going to be the problem.  Having only 512 MB of memory, however, when combined with all the applications you have running (and thus using memory) could very well be the problem.  For XP 512MB is about the minimum you can run the system at without some slowdowns, while I believe the amount is about 1GB for Vista.  This number depends on what exactly you are doing with the computer, and what services are running on it, of course.

Hi Larry R

Thank you for your analysis.  I don't have all those utilities running in my computer as I removed them at Jesse L.'s suggestion.  The only protection I am using is Zone Alarm at this time, so I have decided not to make changes to the memory as your e-mail suggested it would likely be sufficient. 

I would like to explain more clearly what is happening, as you have talked about slowdowns and I would not describe my computer as being slow.   My computer works very quickly once a program has been opened.  The problem is after the mouse has been clicked there is a delay of about 45 seconds before there is a response.  This happens opening programs on or offline, opening Internet Explorer, opening Outlook Express, moving from site to site.  For 15 minutes this morning the computer worked beautifully and I thought my problem had solved itself, but for the rest of the day it has been delaying to the point of frustration.

I welcome any further suggestions you might have, please.

Crab Apple

Hi Jesse

I just wanted to bring you up to date with my on-going problem.  Zone Alarm was uninstalled and reinstalled this weekend with no change in our problem.  While Zone Alarm was shut down the problem remained.  There are currently no other malware utilities running on the computer other than Zone Alarm.  Do you have any further suggestions, please?

What you describe sounds to me like the computer is having to page out processes and applications in order to "make room" for the program you are trying to start.  The fact that it runs fine once it has opened tends to back that up.  If this is what is going on then adding more physical memory to the system should fix things for you.