HELP! Slowdown Problem with a Dell Inspiron 7500 Laptop...

Lucutus

Hi All,

Hoping someone can help with this one, maybe your l33t intarweb searching skillz are better than mine because I couldn't find anything about it.

We have one of these machines here in the office, it has ATI Rage Mobility-P gfx on the chipset.

The problem is that when we open a specific application on the laptop and type within a text area, it's incredibly slow, by the time you've typed the sentance, "Why the hell is this piece of crapola going so slow when I type?", you look at the screen and it's displaying the "Why the hell..." bit, typing the next character really really slowly...

We've discovered a kindof workaround whereby we can higher the color bit depth and lower it again, the system will work perfectly for a period of time, before it slows down again, (either from idle time or when using it!).

The application in question works perfectly fine on all of the other systems here in the office, leading us to beleive it's a driver or hardware issue.

Just a few of the things I've done

---

1. Completely updated Windows 2000 using Windows Update.
2. Installed all the latest drivers from ATI and DELL.
3. Re-partitioned, formatted and re-installed.
4. Torn half of my hair out.

---

Any help on this which leads to a solution will be rewarded by a nice tasty beer or something of equal value paid for by DeVore.

Thanks

Lucutus

rob1891

What's the application, is it only that app or does it happen when typing anywhere? There could be a bug with that version of the app & ati card or somethin?

rob

Lucutus

It's a custom written vb app.

I've thought of that, that it may just simply be the app and the ATI having trouble with each other, that could very well be the case, however, it the app does work with other ATI gfx based machines in the office here, and never shows any sign of slowness or 'lag' on those.

It's a tough call, We'll do a code review and see if that turns up anything.

Lucutus

spongebob

hit ctrl+alt+del WHEN the slowdown is happening .
click Task Manager

click on CPU in the top bar, note the percentage CPU being used by the top 3 progs from the left list

click on Memory (MEM) and note the top 3 there.

It HAS to be a top 3 hog causing this, a max of 6 processes are suspect.

try to Select and 'End Process' each of the CPU intensive processes (first) in turn to see if the computer springs back to life. If you can't, or if it is no good, try the same with the MEM intensive processes. If it is a core part of the OS you will not be allowed to End The Process but it helps reudc the list of suspects from 6

Post the name of the suspect .exe or .dll into google ta find out what it does (when it ain't doggin the cpu or memory that is), frequently it is a background app that bumps itself up the CPU priority order

Sometimes you introduce the problem from service packs and patches but always remember Bill is rich and don;t care.


M

Gerry

I would have thought that vb uses a standard set of libraries for windows graphics drawing. Can you try any other vb apps on it, and see if you have the same problem? Does the whole machine slow down while this delayed input is going on?

Alternatively, you could send me the app and I could try it, I think my laptop has the same chipset.

sceptre

I've a 7500 - no problem trying out the app if you feel like sending it to me

It's currently running 98/XP but I'm happy to bung 2000 temporarily on it.

spongebob

These run in over a dll called the Virtual Machine (like Java)

check the msvbvm50.dll (vb5) and msvbvm60.dll (vb6) virtual machine properties.

these are in the windows\system directory

one may have to up or downgrade to find one that 'likes' the app

my vesrions from properties are

05.02.8244 (SP2) 18/11/99 vb5
6.00.8495 10/05/99 vb6

as it happens!

at least tell us the version of VB used to interpret or compile the app.

I have NT4 btw

M

Lucutus

Thanks for the replies all...

...still have the problem...

Been trying different drivers, looking for a generic SVGA driver for the laptop, seem to work fine, without slowdown using windows default gfx driver (even though it claims to be not working at all!), 16 colours, 640x480.
If anyone knows of where I can get a good Generic SVGA driver which will work under Windows 2000 please post it here!

Gerry, sceptre, thanks lads, I may just take yez up on that! Will be in touch once I have an app online to use in conjunction with it.

Muck, interesting angle on the VB stuff, it's VB 6 we're using, and the version of both files you mentioned on the laptop are:-

05.02.8244 (SP2) for VB5
6.00.8877 for VB6

I will have a poke around and see if I can make it go better using versions of both files from my development system.

Thanks again...

Any other ideas appreciated.

Luc

spongebob

It was to do with a Dll for 3D text box drawing in windows and another Dll for non 3d text box drawing.

If these were ballsed up the VB app could get its knickers in a twist trying to allow text input into a 3d box and it not using the correctly registered dll for that!

ctl3d.dll
ctl3d32.dll
cdl3dv2.dll

ya may have to check these out and see which is registered for what as against what should be.

Good luck

Gerry

Lucutus, try getting newer ati drivers if Muck's suggestions do not work, I know they are quite difficult to track down, but I've done the legwork for this before

http://www.geocities.com/ziyadhosein/rprow2k.htm

This page has loads of different ones to try. The built in win2k drivers were very slow for me, god knows how many issues they have. After getting new drivers, I could play games, and divx ran much faster ( due to hardware motion compensation support ).

spongebob

every now and then a driver cannot be found where it should , so I look here in Driverguide

Click MEMBER LOGIN

then try

drivers
all

when prompted.

Its not a small site and theres loads there (chat and drivers) on ATI alone. The search function has changed ...unfortunately to a version 2 beta or so it seems.

M

Lucutus

Ok,

Having fapped around with multiple driver combinations from your two sources there gents and a load of other sites I managed to find, testing out older versions of dll's for both the vbruntime and the ctl3d stuff and generally going nuts trying to fix this...I'm gonna take gerry and sceptre up on their offer of testing it out on their machines.

Lads, talk to me on IRC if you get a chance, appreciate the help.

Thanks for your suggestions Muck, it could have been any one of those.

Lucutus

lynchie

Another good site for ATI and nVidia drivers

Lucutus

Another clue to this...

Gerry mentioned to me on IRC about Hardware Acceleration and to turn it down/off. I don't know why I never thought of it before, but as soon as I dropped it to it's lowest level, (Disable all accelerations). the application seemed to speed up dramatically.

After this, I managed to incrementally move the slider to it's second highest position, (Disable cursor and bitmap accelerations), without any hit on performance.

The highest acceleration setting makes typing in the application crawl.

Although there is definatly an increase in performance now, the application still is just a little bit laggy.

...a step in the right direction I feel...

Luc