Suddenly slow on Win 2000 Pro

On my wife's laptop running Win 2000 Pro, suddenly her Office applications are slow and a bit weird. In particular, Word takes a very long time to load and misloads. I bought the laptop used in February and sent it to her on her business trip: Toshiba Satellite Pro 4340, Pentium III, 12GB HD, Win 2000 Pro with Office, ethernet card already inserted into the PC card slot on the left. (This was an emergency replacement to her old laptop whose HD blew out, which was the same model Toshiba running Win98SE.) On her trip, the replacement laptop worked well -- she was able to access the hotel's high-speed connection just fine via the ethernet card. Recently, after her return, we installed AOL 8.0 Plus for dial-up (our only connection at home until three weeks ago), increased the RAM to 320MB by installing the extra RAM chips from the old laptop, signed up for Verizon DSL and connected the modem to her ethernet card three weeks ago and, just two days ago, also installed the Linksys wireless router between the modem and her laptop. Her laptop is hard wired to the router via the first ethernet jack on the Linksys and the same ethernet card on her laptop. My own laptop (also the same model Toshiba running Win98SE) is now using a wireless card to access the router. Also: my wife said she was receiving error messages that the Virtual Memory was too low, so, using the Help function, I found the settings for virtual memory and increased minimum to 478 per the guideleine and set maximum to 600 (my guess as there was no guideline for maximum). (This was after installing the DSL and just before installing the router.) We also have Norton AV 2002, Ad-Aware 6 (free), Spybot S&D and ZoneAlarm basic (free) on her laptop. All seems generally OK except that my wife complains her laptop is running a bit slow in general, and she has the specific problem with Word noted above. Sorry for all the detail, but that might help with my question: What should I do to solve the slow Word problem? Thanks for your patience and help.

 

Welcome to the board glnz

Have you removed temp files, ran disk cleanup?
Disk Cleanup

 

Do not mess around w/ the virtual memory settings directly. Often times that sort of an error message indicate an insufficient page file in windows to run the application.

According to the mskb, when you remove/install a new HDD, this problem can occurr as well. Follow the directions carefully and do not skip any steps.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;812448&Product=win2000

 

One point I notice from your posting, is that the "recommended" page size is greater than the physical memory. How much memory is she using during "normal" operation (Word open and other applications she is using)?

To get this information open the Task Manager (via right click on the start bar - bottom of desktop. Or via Control Alt Del), and select the performance tab.

My guess is that you are using more RAM when running than you have physical RAM in the laptop. When this starts happening, your computer will use the hard disk as a RAM area and this is a lot slower than using physical RAM. One of the symptoms is a constant ticking from the hard drive as the system constantly reads and writes RAM information to it.