One PC is Extremely Slow (Windows XP SP3)

Topic

New Reply

My wife has been complaining for some time about how slow her Dell PC is when she accesses certain web sites. I tried it out this morning and noticed how it would take 10 minutes or more for one particular web page to fill-out on the screen! I accessed the same web page on my PC and that page came up immediately. My PC happens to be running Windows Vista now but I don’t think that has anything to do with it. I installed the McAfee security suite on her PC a few months ago and assumed that it was causing the problem so I uninstalled it. That didn’t help. Then I noticed that her IE indicated that it was running the Phishing check while I was waiting for the page to come up so I disabled that in IE and that didn’t help. Later I found that my IE was also doing the Phishing check without causing any noticeable problem. As an example: if you go to http://www.restaurant.com and click on Find Restaurants and enter a ZIP code, her PC takes 10 minutes or more to bring up that page.

Both PCs are accessing the internet through my home network and router. Both are wired to the router. I have run out of ideas! Does anyone have a suggestions as to what I might try to solve this problem?

Thanks,
Bill

Reply | Quote

Replies

Does the Processes tab of Task Manager give a clue? (You can sort on CPU usage by clicking its column header – first click sorts ascending, second one descending etc.)

Reply | Quote

I forgot to mention that the CPU is idle (zero usage) most of the time that I’m waiting for the page to be displayed on her PC. It looks on the surface like all the delay is on the web site. I’ve tried it several times on each PC so it seems unlikely that I’ve just happened to hit good times on my PC and bad times on her PC each time.

Thanks,
Bill

Reply | Quote

You might compare the DNS settings – I once suffered extremely slow internet access because the DNS server I used had become flaky. See How to configure TCP/IP to use DNS in Windows XP.

Reply | Quote

I have changed the DNS settings on the slow PC from automatic to the specific IP addresses of OpenDNS. That has not changed the situation! Obviously, some setting must be incorrect because the two PCs still act the way I described them earlier.

Any other ideas?

Thanks,
Bill

Reply | Quote

Have you tried either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome to see if they perform better? If they do, it must be an Internet Explorer setting. If they don’t, it must be a more general problem.

Reply | Quote

Hans, that’s a good idea! I actually use FireFox on my PC all the time but my wife is sensitive to anything that looks slightly different on her PC so I haven’t tried it there. I’ll do that later today and see what happens. BTW, I did use both FireFox and IE on my PC to run my tests and they both worked equally well on that web site.

It just occurred to me this morning to ask my wife which other web site are so slow and she say she doesn’t know of any!!! So, this problem seems to occurs only on the restaurant.com web site! That is even stranger! It happens either when you click the Find Restaurants button and fill-in a ZIP code or when you go through the process to display for printing an individual restaurant certificate.

Thanks,
Bill

Reply | Quote

A search function would suggest to me some sort of active content. Do both machines have the same versions of Java and Flash? I would also look at ActiveX security settings and see if any of them are different.

Reply | Quote