XP Add/Remove Programs [modified]
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I installed XP Pro on a friends machine, followed by SP2, all additional critical updates, video card drivers, DirectX9, WinRAR, a game, and one or two other items that I can't recall at the moment. When I open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, it takes well over 20 minutes to populate the list of programs. I don't exactly how long it actually took, but I hung around for 20 minutes waiting for it to populate, and the went and did other things for about 45 minutes. When I came back to the machine, the list was populated. Why is it taking so long, and how do I fix it (short of recommending he use Linux). -- modified at 9:27 Thursday 8th February, 2007 More info for new responders: 0) Hardware is a AMD64 3000, 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital hard drive (7200 RPM), ATI Radeon 9200 video card. Hard drive did have Linux on it, but check item #1 below. 1) This install included deleting all existing partitions, formatting, and starting over. 2) The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks, and is rarely even turned on (once every 3rd/4th day). 3) No programs have been removed after being added. 4) Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
I installed XP Pro on a friends machine, followed by SP2, all additional critical updates, video card drivers, DirectX9, WinRAR, a game, and one or two other items that I can't recall at the moment. When I open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, it takes well over 20 minutes to populate the list of programs. I don't exactly how long it actually took, but I hung around for 20 minutes waiting for it to populate, and the went and did other things for about 45 minutes. When I came back to the machine, the list was populated. Why is it taking so long, and how do I fix it (short of recommending he use Linux). -- modified at 9:27 Thursday 8th February, 2007 More info for new responders: 0) Hardware is a AMD64 3000, 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital hard drive (7200 RPM), ATI Radeon 9200 video card. Hard drive did have Linux on it, but check item #1 below. 1) This install included deleting all existing partitions, formatting, and starting over. 2) The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks, and is rarely even turned on (once every 3rd/4th day). 3) No programs have been removed after being added. 4) Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
I installed XP Pro on a friends machine, followed by SP2, all additional critical updates, video card drivers, DirectX9, WinRAR, a game, and one or two other items that I can't recall at the moment. When I open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, it takes well over 20 minutes to populate the list of programs. I don't exactly how long it actually took, but I hung around for 20 minutes waiting for it to populate, and the went and did other things for about 45 minutes. When I came back to the machine, the list was populated. Why is it taking so long, and how do I fix it (short of recommending he use Linux). -- modified at 9:27 Thursday 8th February, 2007 More info for new responders: 0) Hardware is a AMD64 3000, 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital hard drive (7200 RPM), ATI Radeon 9200 video card. Hard drive did have Linux on it, but check item #1 below. 1) This install included deleting all existing partitions, formatting, and starting over. 2) The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks, and is rarely even turned on (once every 3rd/4th day). 3) No programs have been removed after being added. 4) Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
I installed XP Pro on a friends machine, followed by SP2, all additional critical updates, video card drivers, DirectX9, WinRAR, a game, and one or two other items that I can't recall at the moment. When I open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, it takes well over 20 minutes to populate the list of programs. I don't exactly how long it actually took, but I hung around for 20 minutes waiting for it to populate, and the went and did other things for about 45 minutes. When I came back to the machine, the list was populated. Why is it taking so long, and how do I fix it (short of recommending he use Linux). -- modified at 9:27 Thursday 8th February, 2007 More info for new responders: 0) Hardware is a AMD64 3000, 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital hard drive (7200 RPM), ATI Radeon 9200 video card. Hard drive did have Linux on it, but check item #1 below. 1) This install included deleting all existing partitions, formatting, and starting over. 2) The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks, and is rarely even turned on (once every 3rd/4th day). 3) No programs have been removed after being added. 4) Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Was this an upgrade to Windows 98 or ME? I have seen this happen if you upgrade these old 16 bit OS'es. Also, if this was an upgrade, and not a fresh install, spyware, malware and any other type of "ware" can really screws systems up. This may be occurring as a result of some rogue program. Regards,
Brigg Thorp Senior Software Engineer Timex Corporation
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I installed XP Pro on a friends machine, followed by SP2, all additional critical updates, video card drivers, DirectX9, WinRAR, a game, and one or two other items that I can't recall at the moment. When I open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, it takes well over 20 minutes to populate the list of programs. I don't exactly how long it actually took, but I hung around for 20 minutes waiting for it to populate, and the went and did other things for about 45 minutes. When I came back to the machine, the list was populated. Why is it taking so long, and how do I fix it (short of recommending he use Linux). -- modified at 9:27 Thursday 8th February, 2007 More info for new responders: 0) Hardware is a AMD64 3000, 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital hard drive (7200 RPM), ATI Radeon 9200 video card. Hard drive did have Linux on it, but check item #1 below. 1) This install included deleting all existing partitions, formatting, and starting over. 2) The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks, and is rarely even turned on (once every 3rd/4th day). 3) No programs have been removed after being added. 4) Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John, I think what it taking so long because calculate the size of the folders of each installed program. I remember not now, but some programs works like a "interface" to Add/Remove Programs, and load very faster. Try www.ccleaner.com[^]
Engaged in learning of English grammar ;)
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.(John 3:16) :badger: -
I installed XP Pro on a friends machine, followed by SP2, all additional critical updates, video card drivers, DirectX9, WinRAR, a game, and one or two other items that I can't recall at the moment. When I open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, it takes well over 20 minutes to populate the list of programs. I don't exactly how long it actually took, but I hung around for 20 minutes waiting for it to populate, and the went and did other things for about 45 minutes. When I came back to the machine, the list was populated. Why is it taking so long, and how do I fix it (short of recommending he use Linux). -- modified at 9:27 Thursday 8th February, 2007 More info for new responders: 0) Hardware is a AMD64 3000, 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital hard drive (7200 RPM), ATI Radeon 9200 video card. Hard drive did have Linux on it, but check item #1 below. 1) This install included deleting all existing partitions, formatting, and starting over. 2) The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks, and is rarely even turned on (once every 3rd/4th day). 3) No programs have been removed after being added. 4) Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Check the disk for errors. If you show kernel time in task manager, are the red lines way too high? That's often a sign of disk problems.
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I installed XP Pro on a friends machine, followed by SP2, all additional critical updates, video card drivers, DirectX9, WinRAR, a game, and one or two other items that I can't recall at the moment. When I open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, it takes well over 20 minutes to populate the list of programs. I don't exactly how long it actually took, but I hung around for 20 minutes waiting for it to populate, and the went and did other things for about 45 minutes. When I came back to the machine, the list was populated. Why is it taking so long, and how do I fix it (short of recommending he use Linux). -- modified at 9:27 Thursday 8th February, 2007 More info for new responders: 0) Hardware is a AMD64 3000, 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital hard drive (7200 RPM), ATI Radeon 9200 video card. Hard drive did have Linux on it, but check item #1 below. 1) This install included deleting all existing partitions, formatting, and starting over. 2) The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks, and is rarely even turned on (once every 3rd/4th day). 3) No programs have been removed after being added. 4) Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001What were the permissions of the account involved? Far as I know this information is read from a registry key and then each key is validated (key/value is checked on disk). I know what you are talking about but I've never seen it take 20 minutes. Have you tried RegVac to purge the registry of orphans? There's a free trial (30 days) download it and clean the registry and try things again. I would think that on a 3.0 gig processor running on 512 Mb of RAM this process should take about 2 minutes on average. That's a hypothetical assessment on a hypothetical system. So you either have a slow/bad hard-drive with horrible seek times (get the trial of Lavalys Everest to test the system out by running the benchmarks, there's other actual hardware test tools but I don't know them off the top of my head). So in your case the registry is junked up or you have some performance bottleneck from slow/corrupt/bad hardware.
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I installed XP Pro on a friends machine, followed by SP2, all additional critical updates, video card drivers, DirectX9, WinRAR, a game, and one or two other items that I can't recall at the moment. When I open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, it takes well over 20 minutes to populate the list of programs. I don't exactly how long it actually took, but I hung around for 20 minutes waiting for it to populate, and the went and did other things for about 45 minutes. When I came back to the machine, the list was populated. Why is it taking so long, and how do I fix it (short of recommending he use Linux). -- modified at 9:27 Thursday 8th February, 2007 More info for new responders: 0) Hardware is a AMD64 3000, 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital hard drive (7200 RPM), ATI Radeon 9200 video card. Hard drive did have Linux on it, but check item #1 below. 1) This install included deleting all existing partitions, formatting, and starting over. 2) The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks, and is rarely even turned on (once every 3rd/4th day). 3) No programs have been removed after being added. 4) Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Never had that happen to me, well almost never. Sometimes add/remove programs would appear to die on me, so if nothing shows up for >30 seconds I just close the add/remove programs window, open it again and it always gets populated in 10 or so seconds. Try that?
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What kind of machine is your friend using, I've never seen it take more than a minute on my (slow) laptop.
-- Rules of thumb should not be taken for the whole hand.
AMD64 3000 with 1gb RAM and a 40gb hard drive
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
Was this an upgrade to Windows 98 or ME? I have seen this happen if you upgrade these old 16 bit OS'es. Also, if this was an upgrade, and not a fresh install, spyware, malware and any other type of "ware" can really screws systems up. This may be occurring as a result of some rogue program. Regards,
Brigg Thorp Senior Software Engineer Timex Corporation
Nope - it was a delete-all-existing-partitions-and-start-over kind of install
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
What were the permissions of the account involved? Far as I know this information is read from a registry key and then each key is validated (key/value is checked on disk). I know what you are talking about but I've never seen it take 20 minutes. Have you tried RegVac to purge the registry of orphans? There's a free trial (30 days) download it and clean the registry and try things again. I would think that on a 3.0 gig processor running on 512 Mb of RAM this process should take about 2 minutes on average. That's a hypothetical assessment on a hypothetical system. So you either have a slow/bad hard-drive with horrible seek times (get the trial of Lavalys Everest to test the system out by running the benchmarks, there's other actual hardware test tools but I don't know them off the top of my head). So in your case the registry is junked up or you have some performance bottleneck from slow/corrupt/bad hardware.
He's using the machine with the administrator account, and since this is a brand new install, there shouldn't be any orphans/registry defragging/disk defragging necessary. The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
Never had that happen to me, well almost never. Sometimes add/remove programs would appear to die on me, so if nothing shows up for >30 seconds I just close the add/remove programs window, open it again and it always gets populated in 10 or so seconds. Try that?
Yep, tried that - it just starts the 20-minute wait over again...
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
AMD64 3000 with 1gb RAM and a 40gb hard drive
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Do a complete shut-down and boot after all that activity before going add/remove.
“Some have an idea that the reason we in this country discard things so readily is because we have so much. The facts are exactly opposite - the reason we have so much is simply because we discard things so readily. We replace the old in return for something that will serve us better.”--Alfred P. Sloan
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He's using the machine with the administrator account, and since this is a brand new install, there shouldn't be any orphans/registry defragging/disk defragging necessary. The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001It may be that your harddrive had some manufacturing problems and the seek times are enormous. You could probably do a benchmark and see how that goes, just to get this out of the equation.
cheers, Mircea "Pay people peanuts and you get monkeys" - David Ogilvy
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I installed XP Pro on a friends machine, followed by SP2, all additional critical updates, video card drivers, DirectX9, WinRAR, a game, and one or two other items that I can't recall at the moment. When I open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, it takes well over 20 minutes to populate the list of programs. I don't exactly how long it actually took, but I hung around for 20 minutes waiting for it to populate, and the went and did other things for about 45 minutes. When I came back to the machine, the list was populated. Why is it taking so long, and how do I fix it (short of recommending he use Linux). -- modified at 9:27 Thursday 8th February, 2007 More info for new responders: 0) Hardware is a AMD64 3000, 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital hard drive (7200 RPM), ATI Radeon 9200 video card. Hard drive did have Linux on it, but check item #1 below. 1) This install included deleting all existing partitions, formatting, and starting over. 2) The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks, and is rarely even turned on (once every 3rd/4th day). 3) No programs have been removed after being added. 4) Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001Disclaimer: I may not held responsible for any damage, blahblahblah... ;) Anyway, in the Windows directory, you can find a bunch of other directories, names starting with $NtUninstall(something). You can easilly guess which of this directories correspond to what item in the Add/Remove list. If you are 100% sure you don't want to roll back any of these service packs/updates, just delete the corresponding folders - then open Add/Remove Programs again and try to "remove" them. You'll get an error message that something cannot be found, and the item will disappear from the Add/Remove list.
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Disclaimer: I may not held responsible for any damage, blahblahblah... ;) Anyway, in the Windows directory, you can find a bunch of other directories, names starting with $NtUninstall(something). You can easilly guess which of this directories correspond to what item in the Add/Remove list. If you are 100% sure you don't want to roll back any of these service packs/updates, just delete the corresponding folders - then open Add/Remove Programs again and try to "remove" them. You'll get an error message that something cannot be found, and the item will disappear from the Add/Remove list.
The problem is not what's in the list. The problem is that it takes over 20 minutes to populate the list.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
The problem is not what's in the list. The problem is that it takes over 20 minutes to populate the list.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
The problem is that it takes over 20 minutes to populate the list.
Don't you just love having to explain yourself over and over!
"Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed" - 2 Timothy 2:15
"Judge not by the eye but by the heart." - Native American Proverb
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I installed XP Pro on a friends machine, followed by SP2, all additional critical updates, video card drivers, DirectX9, WinRAR, a game, and one or two other items that I can't recall at the moment. When I open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, it takes well over 20 minutes to populate the list of programs. I don't exactly how long it actually took, but I hung around for 20 minutes waiting for it to populate, and the went and did other things for about 45 minutes. When I came back to the machine, the list was populated. Why is it taking so long, and how do I fix it (short of recommending he use Linux). -- modified at 9:27 Thursday 8th February, 2007 More info for new responders: 0) Hardware is a AMD64 3000, 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital hard drive (7200 RPM), ATI Radeon 9200 video card. Hard drive did have Linux on it, but check item #1 below. 1) This install included deleting all existing partitions, formatting, and starting over. 2) The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks, and is rarely even turned on (once every 3rd/4th day). 3) No programs have been removed after being added. 4) Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001I'd check the System event log to see if there are any disk or disk controller errors in there. If there are, Windows may have downgraded the disk access mode/speed to a lower one to try to stop the errors occurring. Worst case it's gone into Programmed I/O (PIO) mode. If that is the problem, check that the cable is plugged in correctly, isn't damaged, is the right sort (80-way for parallel IDE), and is relatively short. If all of these things seem OK, and changing the cable doesn't help, replace the hard disk. I have hundreds of programs installed and it takes less than two minutes to fill this in, including one place where it thinks a tiny product takes 18GB of space. Removing that one cut it down to nine seconds (although some of this was probably cached). That's on a 3.0GHz P4, 1GB RAM, WD 250GB HDD with 8MB cache on first-gen Serial ATA (1.5Gbps?).
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
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I'd check the System event log to see if there are any disk or disk controller errors in there. If there are, Windows may have downgraded the disk access mode/speed to a lower one to try to stop the errors occurring. Worst case it's gone into Programmed I/O (PIO) mode. If that is the problem, check that the cable is plugged in correctly, isn't damaged, is the right sort (80-way for parallel IDE), and is relatively short. If all of these things seem OK, and changing the cable doesn't help, replace the hard disk. I have hundreds of programs installed and it takes less than two minutes to fill this in, including one place where it thinks a tiny product takes 18GB of space. Removing that one cut it down to nine seconds (although some of this was probably cached). That's on a 3.0GHz P4, 1GB RAM, WD 250GB HDD with 8MB cache on first-gen Serial ATA (1.5Gbps?).
Stability. What an interesting concept. -- Chris Maunder
He did admit that he installed a drive of questionable stability (a 2nd drive - 40gb), and that he had to re-partition/format it. I'll look at that tonight.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001 -
I installed XP Pro on a friends machine, followed by SP2, all additional critical updates, video card drivers, DirectX9, WinRAR, a game, and one or two other items that I can't recall at the moment. When I open the Add/Remove Programs control panel applet, it takes well over 20 minutes to populate the list of programs. I don't exactly how long it actually took, but I hung around for 20 minutes waiting for it to populate, and the went and did other things for about 45 minutes. When I came back to the machine, the list was populated. Why is it taking so long, and how do I fix it (short of recommending he use Linux). -- modified at 9:27 Thursday 8th February, 2007 More info for new responders: 0) Hardware is a AMD64 3000, 1gb RAM, 80gb Western Digital hard drive (7200 RPM), ATI Radeon 9200 video card. Hard drive did have Linux on it, but check item #1 below. 1) This install included deleting all existing partitions, formatting, and starting over. 2) The machine has only been alive for a couple of weeks, and is rarely even turned on (once every 3rd/4th day). 3) No programs have been removed after being added. 4) Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:
- Since nothing has been removed from the system, it seems to me that disk defragging and registry cleaning/defragging should not be an issue.
Disk defragging should always at least be "peeked at" (start defrag, analyze: all blue, on to next). Any slowdown it is my first "check" if only to rule it out fast so that other things can be examined. Testing the "easy" fixes is just a habit now. The other is check the registry for errors. All it takes is one: process 10 programs add/remove, get error, wait 10 minutes for timeout, continue through list. I don't know why the registry timeout is so high, but I have encountered this before at about 10 minutes per registry error in the add/remove list. Fix is either fix registry, or uninstall or fix software install. Ironically the solution for removing the $uninstall has the same sideaffect, if you find the software causing the problems. This is conjecture though. I don't know all the inards of add/remove, but as far as I know it goes through this process: get list of software from registry A) check one for registry options of undelete B) check for presence of uninstaller C) check size of uninstall if it were to happen( where the main time is spent) D) get next item, go to A This process continues regardless of errors. If the registry entry points to wrong information, it still attempts to check for a size of the uninstall or wait until the size routine times out. someone else had something similar: http://forumz.tomshardware.com/software/Add-Remove-programs-slow-populating-list-ftopict117824.html[^] the other route is replace the windows uninstaller with other options: http://www.download.com/Easy-Uninstaller/3000-2096_4-10388208.html?tag=lst-3-10[^] (there are many others) If the problem is specifically with the windows add/remove program utility, then replacing it will speed things up. If the problem is with disk access, memory access, or other speed of the physical sys
