Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with slow

Toilet works: slow flushing toilet

twistedmetal — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:42:38 -0800

My toilet is flushing slowly. Sometimes it takes 3+ flushes to completely remove waste. I have completely replaced all of the internals, and tried the CLR method. I have even manually cleared out the return / fill holes. It has helped some, but not enough. I think I need to use something stronger than CLR, like muriatic acid. The problem is I am on a septic tank and everything I read says do not use the muriatic acid method if you are on septic as it will kill all of the beneficial bacteria in the septic tank. So, my thoughts are to use the muriatic acid to clean out the bowl, but before the first flush, use baking soda to neutralize the acid as much as possible. Then flush. After about a week, add some RidX to help restore some of the lost bacteria and after another week or so, add another box of RidX. Is this a sound plan or should I abandon the muriatic acid idea completely?

What is causing my DSL slowdown?

monkeybutt — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 18:30:41 -0800

What is causing my DSL slowdown? Ok...suddenly my home DSL connection became very unstable. I'm working on a very stable and relatively static computer setup at home. My main box is a Kubuntu 7.10 distro running on a Core2 box. My router is a Belkin Vision N1. Everything was working great until I called up AT&T (my DSL provider) and upgraded my service from 3MB to 6MB (and saved myself $5/mo in the process....go figure).

anyway about that time i noticed that pageviews seemed to take a LOT longer....sometimes 10+ seconds to bring up a website. quite often my browser will timeout waiting for a page to load. watching the handy speedometer on the router indicates very long periods of inactivity. when it *does* connect it truly does reflect the new speed of my connection (typically 4.5MB...which is pretty much what i expected). also my usenet newsreader has been reporting errors with literally everything it downloads. no idea why.

everything in this setup was working well for a long time *before* the upgrade. the only new factor is the call to AT&T that triggered some type of activity on my connection. i suspect i got switched to a different server or set of trunk lines or something and that new topology is buggy. how can i diagnose it further? are there any tools that can robustly test my setup/connection and expose a likely culprit in the path between me and the rest of the world? my calls to AT&T have resulted in nothing but "we tested your line and it appears to be fine."

and i feel i need to give a bit more information: yes i've rebooted/cycled everything in the setups. i've even replaced the router with an old Linksys i had sitting around to no avail. every machine in the house (2 linux machines, 1 windows box, 1 windows laptop and 2 macbook pros) experiences the symptoms and it doesn't matter if they are wireless, wired, connected to the router or going through a secondary switch.

thanks for any help

Why are certain YouTube videos consistently slow?

excitementMD — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 20:38:59 -0800

Some YouTube videos download *painfully* slow (5-12kb/s) while others will stream just fine near 200kb/s. I've had friends try and watch the videos that are trouble for me, and they work for them. Can anybody else confirm these problems? Is there a certain YouTube server that Verizon is throttling in Philadelphia, or is it just a routing problem? So, first let's get this out of the way: I'm rewatching some old Night Court episodes. Not sure why. Got the theme song stuck in my head, and here we are. Here is a slow video, and Here is a fast one, both posted by the same user. Just for good measure, another slow one.

I don't think it is server load, as these specific videos have been consistently slow over the past week. I'm stumped. Any ideas, intertubes?

Slow Net Acces on One Macbook in the House

scarabic — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:27:34 -0800

One particular Mac on my home network is experiencing really slow internet connectivity. I have tried a lot of different stuff so far... 1) Wireless network with an Apple Airport Extreme wireless router plugged into DSL. It's set up to share the connection with DHCP clients, of which we have several:
a. The Macbook in question
b. Another Macbook which seems okay
c. 2 PCs
d. a TiVo
e. A mini set up as our HTPC

2) This laptop was fine for a long time in this location. I don't think it's a physical problem with the wireless access.

One day I set up BitTorrent port forwarding for the mini and now everything is fucked.

3) I have backed out all the changes I made in port forwarding

4) I have turned off the mini - which itself seems to work great

5) There is nothing running on the other computers - no iTunes, no bittorrent, nothing.

6) I have restarted absolutely everything in the house singly and together

7) The problem is somewhat intermittent - some days it's fine, others its incredibly slow. Restarts of the Macbook in question don't help.

8) The slowness in browsing doesn't particularly seem to be isolated to the DNS lookup stage. That happens slowly, but so does everything else.

9) I have tried various TCP/IP configs on the MacBook - DHCP, DHCP with manual address, full manual setup, DNS specified, DNS set by the router... no difference whatsoever.

10) And now for the REALLY confounding part: The PCs on the network are absolutely fine. I can browse the net with them just dandy. It's Firefox on the Macbook which is painful, and that seems to be about all.

What am I missing? I would have called the ISP by now but since some computers seem okay, I have not tried that yet.

Badware (or why I can't get to Gmail.)

Arquimedez Pozo — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 09:33:41 -0800

I have some sort of malware on my Dell that constantly redirects me away from where I desire to go. Specifically, it seems to prevent Gmail from working. Also prevents any major search site from loading. Always redirects to some idiotic ad site. Which means I can't even search Metafilter to find out if this has been asked before. Life without Google is hard!
I'm running an updated Firefox with windows XP. I have used: Hijackthis, Adaware, McAfee (worse than useless), Spyware Doctor, Ewido, Everything in the Best Buy toolkit
(kind of like hitman pro), and Sophos. I can detect and delete a gobbledigook DLL running as an .exe when I use Hijackthis, but it respawns when Firefox restarts. I'm not an idiot, but have only enough knowledge of the processes involved to be dangerous. It also seems to disable Windows Automatic Update service. I've done an end run around my inability to use Gmail by using thunderbird.

Any suggestions? If the only answers left are reformat, reformat and buy a new machine I can accept that.

FYI: I was running as an admin, a mistake not to be repeated, but something has disabled those privileges, and that something wasn't me.

And yes, my next computer will be a Mac.

As slow as ... what?

Fuzzy Skinner — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:29:27 -0800

What are some good - or bad - similes for slowness? (Like "As slow as molasses in January" but not so archaic.)

Whenever I require a password on my wireless network it slows to a crawl.

ssmith — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:14:16 -0800

Whenever I require a password on my wireless network it slows to a crawl. If i set a password my speed drops to half (or less), if I get rid of the password - leaving all the other settings the same - it pops back up to being fast and responsive. Is it normal that adding password security would slow things down *so* much?

I'm using Comcast cable as my provider. The cable modem is plugged into an AirPort Extreme 802.11g with fully updated firmware. I'm connecting an intel iMac and an old G4 titanium laptop. But I mostly notice the slowdown on the iMac.

Up to now wireless security hasn't really been that important, but I recently moved to an area where the houses are much closer together, and it's something that I finally want to address.

Network speed is something that's really important to me. I play a lot of online games where lag is a serious concern (DotA FTW) as well as stream video, XBox Live etc.

Is there going to be a "secret setting" where I can have the best of both? It seems like I've tried every variation and option without success.

Should I reinstall XP?

Kiwi — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:38:37 -0800

Should I reinstall XP to speed up my laptop? After a couple of years of use, my laptop is starting to run a little slow. I've heard that uninstalling and reinstalling Windows XP and all other programs can speed things up dramatically. Is it worth the hassle of doing this? How long before it starts to slow down again?

A little quicker, self, if you please.

StrikeTheViol — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:26:18 -0800

Help me be faster...at everything. All my life, I've tended to be a little more deliberate than other people I know, working slowly, eating slowly, exercising slowly....I'd like to be faster. It's not really a question of energy or physical limitation...I can have an espresso quad shot and still be slower than some others. The only time I've really been lightning quick was when I felt in danger, but I'm not really sure I want to visualize that all day. Any suggestions, Mefi?

(P.S. Please no illegal drug suggestions.)

Firefox is slow

josher71 — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:24:48 -0800

I use a Gateway laptop with Firefox but Firefox is running incredibly slowly. I've done virus scans and so on but Firefox is still having problems. Anyone got a remedy?

Windows Update borked my Vista laptop

AstroGuy — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:05:41 -0800

Vista hangs while switching to/from Secure Desktop after Windows Update installed a new sound driver. Please help me fix it. HP Pavillion dv6449 laptop with pre-installed Vista Home Premium.

Recent Windows Update attempted to update Conexant sound driver. Install failed. Upon reboot, no sound. Went into device manager, removed driver, Window reloaded it, sound fixed.

Ever since then, the PC hangs 5-20 seconds coming back from secure desktop. I've disabled UAC eliminate some of the lags. I have the system configured to require a password on wake-up from standby. Laptop wakes up instantly, login screen appears instantly. Type in password, screen goes blank, hear the "da-dink" sound effect, then screen stays blank for 20 seconds or more before desktop appears.

Actions that would invoke the secure desktop (UAC, ctrl-alt-del) act the same way, but delay is only 5 to 10 seconds of blank screen.

This definitely did not do this before the borked driver update. Secure Desktop activations/UAC prompts flickered and appeared instantly. Now these delays are driving my nuts. I hope the pending release of SP1 on Windows Update might fix this, but if there's anything I can do in the meantime to troubleshoot and fix this please let me know.

I'm quite technically experienced on older versions of Windows, but my technical knowledge and troubleshooting skills are limited on Vista.

Help. My mac runs slow.

hazyspring — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:37:29 -0800

Help me, my mac is running slow! I have a theory that this relates to not utilizing the full amount of memory that is available. I have an 800 MHz PowerPC G4 with 1GB of RAM. Still using Tiger.

Using a simple program like Firefox or Photoshop moves semi-slowly (even with no other progams open) - at least compared to my pc. When I watch the activity monitor, my % user will shoot up to 40-90% and stay there while Firefox is open. But my % of System stays pretty low. Below 30% usually.

Any explanation on this?

Also, I have Cocktail, and ran it, and it helped my computer overall, but not while using programs like firefox.

Is my laptop slowing the family desktop?

andythebean — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 14:08:04 -0800

Is my laptop slowing the family desktop? I've just come home from college for the holidays. The family desktop is where the wireless router is hooked up. Since I've been home and using the wifi, the rest of my family has complained that the desktop's connection to the internet has been excruciatingly slow. My laptop, my sister's laptop, and my dad's laptop are all working fine. Is is possible that the recent arrival of my laptop is slowing the connection for the desktop?

My Mac is starting up so s-l-o-w-l-y

pman78 — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:25:44 -0800

My Mac PB takes about 10 minutes to start up and then another 5 to load mac mail or safari. Am I about to crash? Here's the scoop...I'm not a techie so I'll do the best I can. I have an Intel PB about 2 years old. OS 10.4.10. About a month ago I realized that my HD was almost full and began to get rid of stuff to free up space. I've emptied my trash. I now have 13 GB free; 97 GB used. When I start up my mac it takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r (10-15 minutes?) to load up and get me to the desktop. And then it takes about 5 minutes more to load any program. Once it's up and going it seems to be fine with the exception of loading any web pages which seem to take about 30-45 seconds for Safari to even recognize the web address and then it's slow to load the pages. I'm pretty sure the two things (slow start up and slow loading web pages) are connected as they both started happening around the same time. I've run disk utilities, I've run Onyx, I've zapped my pram, I've backed up, I've removed most files and projects from my desktop....nothing seems to help. To my best recolection all of this trouble seemed to start when I started throwing stuff in the trash to free up space. Before that it was fine. Does this make any sense? Is my Mac about to die a painful death? Should I re install the OS? Or is it something else? Any help is very much appreciated....

computer can't load executables smoothly

Baby_Balrog — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 13:48:42 -0800

Laptop acting strangely. Could it be caused by overheating? I know a little bit about computers - I keep my laptop pretty damn clean, use CCleaner and various other programs to eliminate clutter, I defrag regularly and use spybot searchanddestroy amongst others. The problem seems strange to me. Dell Inspiron 600m, stock components, Windows XP Pro. It's not running slowly all the time - rather, when I try to launch a program it chokes. Firefox takes several minutes to boot up, but once it's running everything goes smoothly. Regular XP utilities seem to work just fine once the program loads. Some programs refuse to launch at all - I can't get the taskmanager to load. I get the hourglass then nothing happens. The computer won't shut down on its own. OpenOffice is the same - takes a full minute and a half to launch and then runs fine.
All the diagnostic stuff (once it launches) isn't turning up anything.
Is it possible that by leaving my laptop on in a hot room for several days without using the powersaver feature cooked something? I thought possibly that a ram module or something got fried - maybe the computer is having a hard time putting together enough ram to load the program but once it does everything is ok.
Is there some kind of (small!) utility that I could run? Most registry cleaners are big, klunky things that I can't get to load... the computers just chokes.
Also, I can't load the "uninstall software" utility, either. The fact that the taskmanager won't load means that I can't see if there's some kind of rogue process going on, eating up my available memory - but if that were the case, wouldn't firefox run slowly after launch? How can I use the system prompt to determine which processes are running?
Is this kind of thing symptomatic of faulty or broken RAM?
I have the same problem running in safe-mode and after using system restore to go back to the earliest available date.

Please forgive my 10th grade understanding of computers.

Jumpy slow mouse pointer in one screen

rainy — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 19:24:09 -0800

Jumpy mouse in one screen. My mouse pointer does not refresh fast enough in one screen but is fine in second screen. I have an Asus video card based on nvidia 6200. It's driving 2 displays, one optiquest 22", the other NEC 19". The first one is dvi, windows is XP. On first screen, the cursor is very jumpy, it does not refresh often enough. If moved with an average speed, it jumps about every 1/3rd of a centimeter, instead of moving smoothly. On the second display it does jump but very little, the difference is huge. I guess they always jump a little, it should depend on monitor refresh rate unless processor is extremely slow. Here processor is athlon X2 3200. Changing resolutions and color depths does not make any difference. Using Asus or nvidia drivers and various settings in them does not make any difference. Everything else works fine on that large display, including dvd movies - this seems to be related only to mouse cursor. In win2k which I dual boot it seems to work much better, but I don't remember for certain, I used win2k and did not notice anything but after a day in XP I did notice by contrast with the 2nd display. I tried both Asus driver and Nvidia driver, and many various options in either. This is annoying because I work in CAD programs and I have to watch cursor carefully and it's just annoying that it jumps so much. I get the feeling that system is slow even though it's very fast. In the end it's more comfortable to use the 2nd display even though it's so much smaller. Another clue is that it seems to be ok after system is started but I think (I didn't test yet), if you start Autocad it becomes bad and after closing Autocad it stays bad. What could it be?

Make a DVD to play at 1 frame per minute?

bystander — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:46:18 -0800

Make a DVD to play at 1 frame per minute? I want to take a bunch of time lapse photos, shot 1 minute apart, and play them back on a TV in real time, so the TV mimics a window. What software can I do this with, preferably on windows?
Ideally, I want to stick a DVD in the player, press play and then it plays for 12 or 24 hours. Is this possible? I know some DVD players have photo slide show functions, but my preference is to just play a very slow movie.

Routed by my slow router

escabeche — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:24:37 -0800

Why is my brand-new router massively slowing my Internet connection, even when everything's connected with cables? There have been several slow router questions on Ask MeFi, but I couldn't find one that really matched my situation. We recently became a two-laptop family. Our first computer is a Thinkpad T42, which we had been using connected directly to the jack in the wall via Ethernet cable. Nice fast connection. We now have a MacBook Pro, so I bought a router (Belkin Wireless G) and connected that to the wall. The Mac works fine, but the Thinkpad now loads pages very slowly. What confuses me is that this is the case whether I run the Thinkpad on the wireless, or run a short Ethernet cable directly from computer to router. Why should the latter be any different from connecting the Thinkpad directly to the jack?

Some possibly relevant data based on my reading:

* Some posters mentioned that encryption from the router might slow things down. I _tried_ to encrypt the router when I set it up, but I think I failed; at least, I was never prompted for a password when I connected to the wireless on my Mac.

* The Thinkpad can run Linux or Windows XP, and the slowdown happens either way.

* I guess one possibility is that the short cable connecting Thinkpad to router is faulty; I only have one, so I haven't been able to check. Could a bad cable slow down the network connection without cutting it off entirely? It still works fine, just much more slowly.

Thanks for all help!

Why is System using 85% of my CPU?

signal — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 07:10:02 -0800

The task manager on my WIndows XP SP2 box shows 100% CPU usage constantly. Whenever I'm not doing anything actually resource intensive (like using Firefox, sigh), "System" uses up 80-90% of the CPU. This is not normal Procces Explorer shows a thread within "System" which is using around 75% of the CPU with the following start address: parport.sys+0xe474

Any suggestions? I'm running NOD32. Could post a hijackthis log if that helps.

Why is my PC is too slow for DSL

fkeese — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 11:16:47 -0800

I just got DSL broadband and, while it is the slowest of AT&T's 3 levels of speed, it still is only a bit faster than the old dialup. A test using a borrowed laptop on the same phone line was much faster, so something is slowing things down in my PC, but what? Processor is old and slow, at 400Mhz, 375mb ram, 4 gigs hd free space, Win ME, running MSIE and Opera browsers. My desktop has about 100+ items on it. Could this be my problem?

Apache limiting my transfer speed?

mjger — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 14:59:50 -0800

Apache Filter: Why are my downloads so slow from my web server running Apache? I am currently running Apache 2.2.4 for directory browsing purposes only. Apache is running in Windows Vista Business with a 10 mbit up/down internet connection. When I download any files off this Apache server my speed maxes out at 150 KB/sec. If I use IIS instead of Apache then I can completely utilize my 10 mbit connection.

Is the default configuration in Apache limiting my speeds? If so, how do I fix this. Thanks much.

XP unusably slow after STOP errors and running checkdisk - what's going on?

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 12:29:42 -0800

So it's come to this - I see no other option than to ask a "help me fix my PC" question. After some troubleshooting the STOP errors seem to have been resolved, XP now boots successfully but is excruciating slow to the point of being unusable. Details and specs below the fold. Specifications:
-Intel Celeron 2.4GHz
-1 x 512 MB RAM
-XP Pro SP2
-PCI Firewire card
-onboard: USB 2.0, VIA Gigabit Ethernet adapter

IDE config:

1M: HD Maxtor 80 GB U-ATA
1S: empty
2M: DVD Burner
2S: DVD-ROM

First, the BIOS would occasionally fail to find the boot device (HD). Setting the primary master to "Not Installed" and rebooting, and then back to "Auto" remedied this for the time being.

Then a few days ago the machine started throwing a bunch of BSODs during normal operation. I recorded some of them for your viewing pleasure:

0x000000F4, 0x00000003, 0x829FF020, 0x829FF194 0xc000000E, 0xC000000E, 0x00000000, 0x05357000 0x0000007A (0XC03E1128, 0XC0000185, 0XF844A074, 0X08195860) ACPI.SYS 0x0000008E (0XC0000005, 0X8054AE34, 0XF6505BF4, 0X00000000)

Eventually XP wouldn't boot at all: system32/config was 'corrupted', or something along those lines. I assume this happened as a result of one of the STOP errors.

For some reason CHKDSK wouldn't run on this machine, so I took out the drive and ran CHKDSK on it with the drive attached to another machine. It did find a bunch of errors and corrected them all.

I put it back in its own box, and ran CHKDSK again from the Recovery Console (ran fine this time, and found no errors) and also a FIXBOOT for good measure.

Which brings us to the current situation. The system32/config error is gone, and Windows does boot, *but*:

-The XP splash screen fades in very slowly and seems halted here and there.
-Upon logon, the desktop background loads but no icons or taskbar appear.
-I can load explorer and systray via taskmgr, and sometimes they eventually load on their own without intervention, but this takes a *long* time. Somewhere in the ten minutes order of magnitude.

So technically speaking, Windows now runs, but it's so excruciatingly slow it's basically unusable.

Additional details:
-I have run a Spybot Search & Destroy scan: it found some threats and removed them. No new findings upon further boots and/or Spybot runs.
-I would scan for viruses, but I can't install AVG Free: I just removed the old 7.1 version (had to anyway as it was no longer supported), and the 7.5 installer happily skips from "pick a directory" to "Installation Complete!" but never seems to have touched a file at all! Doesn't even create the specified directory in Program Files.
-Network now also doesn't work. The Network Connections window says "Connected" but the machine receives no IP address nor lease from router. Router and rest of network are running fine.
-I tried System Restore with a variety of restore points from the past two weeks or so, but after going through the process (which also takes very long) it reboots and tells me that restoring to the previous point failed.

In short, I'm confused and could really use your insight. What's causing this and how can I fix it? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed upon this. If you have any questions or need any further details, I'd be happy to answer and provide them.

Java?! More like molasses.

photoslob — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 20:40:51 -0800

Why are java apps so slow on OS X? I'm forced to use an imaging app for raw file conversions that is written in java and it is painfully slow. I'm using a Mac dual G5 1.8 with 4 gigs of RAM and no matter what I do the app is unusable. It's been my experience that anything written in java and run on a Mac is sluggish at best. Does the same hold true for Windows PC's or is this a Mac specific problem?

Outlook 2007 worked so well for months....

tiamat — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 10:04:09 -0800

Outlook 2007 suddenly freezes at the splash screen... Recently I've started having trouble with my copy of Outlook 2007 (both the B2TR and the Gold version). I've been running it fine for quite a while and can't think of any recent changes that should be causing this. The only thing I've done recently is switch back to XP from Vista, and it worked fine for over a week after the clean install.

System is Pentium M 2ghz 1gb ram with plenty of free HD space.

Outlook seems to freeze for 2-5 minutes at the splash screen. All other Office 2007 programs run fine.

I have:
-run the PST fixing program
-disabled the MSN integration
-tried enabling or disabling all addins and COM extensions
-tried re-installing Office
-tried re-re-installing Office after deleting the Program Files\Microsoft Office\, the Common Files\Microsoft Office\ directories and the Software\Microsoft\Office registry keys
-tried running it in safe mode and with selective startup with no other programs running in the background (like AV or firewall)
-tried running it with a different (or no) PST file.
-I've run ccleaner

Is there some better way to do a clean install of Office than uninstalling and deleteing the Files and Registry settings as I did above? Because even when I do that Office still seems to know where my PST files are stored (not the default location) and that makes me think it might also be remembering some wrong setting that's causing it to go wonky.

Also, does anyone know what Outlook is doing while the splash screen is up? One weird aspect of this is that Outlook seems to run just fine once its started, it's only slow starting.

Packets at a snail's pace

Chrysostom — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 17:35:48 -0800

Very strange internet connectivity issue driving me batty.... I am suddenly having sporadic problems with my net connection. The amount of data flowing in just slows to a crawl. Effects are visible in both Firefox and IE, as well as other applications downloading from the net (a Spybot update, for example). A simple page can take minutes to open.

The really mysterious part is that this seems to be happening regardless of where I am. Home or office, VPN or no, Ethernet or WiFi, it just keeps happening. And it's not 100% consistent-sometimes things will open okay for a while.

I've tried super obvious things like rebooting, clearing caches, using the "repair network connection" in Windows, but to no avail. I've got lots of extensions in Firefox, but this is not an FFX-only problem. I didn't do any installs or configuration changes to XP that I can think of-it just seems to have started at random.

Any ideas? This is beyond annoying.