On 19 Jul 98 at 12:17, R. Davis wrote:

> My problem is that my system is very slow in responding.
>
> Can anyone tell me what might be causing this and what do I need
> to do to fix it?

  Accesses to disk are several orders of magnitude slower than
accesses to memory, so we might guess that the machine is having to
access the disk a whole lot.

  Your examples involve (at least) reading from the disk, and that
*shouldn't* be too awful on a 1.5GB drive.  It *may* be slowed down a
bit if you've added an older CD-ROM drive to the same channel, but
probably not to the extent that you describe.

  What takes a lot of time is *writing* to the drive.  That shouldn't
be necessary (generally speaking -- we'll get to the exception in a
moment) for the tasks you describe.
  It could become necessary, however, if the system has to "swap"
data out of RAM to make room for the stuff it needs to read....

  On a systemm where the available RAM is a bit smaller than the
current tasks really call for, an occasional swap trades away
performance for convenience and cost savings.  But as the memory
requirement goes further above what's available, the machine can get
into a state called "thrashing" where it spends so much of its time
swapping that it takes a while to get anything else done.  That's
what I think is probably happening.

  The most likely possibility is that you've only got 4MB or 8MB of
RAM, and your typical task mix would prefer at least 16MB and maybe
even 32MB.  [Your exact options are going to depend on your
motherboard's memory features.]
  There is a second possibility, that you may have RAM installed that
isn't being recognized by the operating system.  That's less likely,
though.

David G