Problems with chat room(s) (PC tech)

[CanuckAmok]

My PC doesn't want to do any realtime communication in any "chat" software.

What happens is that the windows will "freeze" without warning, and eventually all the posts and replies will come flooding in all at once.

Then the same thing happens.

I've tried disabling the Windows firewall. I've tried disabling the Norton AntiVirus. Nothing changes.

I'm running XP Media Edition on a Toshiba laptop.

Any suggestions on anything else I should enable/disable?

[Fredda Weinberg]

1. Sounds like the operating system swapping memory

XP Media Edition is a RAM piggy; doing practically nothing else, it eats up 2 GB on my desktop. Can you open Task Manager (right mouse click on blank space in the task bar) and verify you have enough system resources real time?

[dolo amber]

2. Definitely sounds like a RAM issue

Try turning off any programs you don't need/aren't using. :thumbsup:

[CanuckAmok]

3. CPU Usage: 7%. PF Useage: 268MB

That doesn't seem to be too much. I have 1.25Gig of RAM.

[Fredda Weinberg]

6. Was that a snapshot or did you see it while chatting?

My Page File Usage History stays flat - does yours?

[JVS]

4. I'm sure someone will be here soon to tell you to get a mac

[leeroysphitz]

5. Are you using IE? If so do you have Java installed?

If not go to sun's website and install the latest version of Java.

Couldn't hurt.

[sendero]

7. I agree..

... with the rest of the folks here. this is almost always caused by a processor/IO bottleneck. Basically, the computer gets "behind", then it catches up. this is usually caused by disk IO, when you are "frozen" do you see the disk light blinking or near solid?

CPU usage doesn't mean much - the CPU on most modern PCs is loafing most of the time.

Since you seem to have plenty of RAM, maybe some other program is hogging the system.

Turn on Task Manager, go to processes and click on the CPU column header, which will sort by CPU usage (need some way to move the busy processes to the top of the list so you might see them) If there is anything up there you don't understand, do a google and find out what it is.

[CanuckAmok]

8. Closing some programs helped.

Still had a lag, though.

'the hell? What was the point of all that RAM?