Problem w/WinRAR

[ajtip]

Hi all. I'm hoping someone can help me with a solution to this not quite lifethreatening, but very annoying problem. Maybe a little background first.

Old puter-PII 350 MHz, 256 MB SDRAM, WinXP Pro,WinRAR 3.0

New puter- PIV 2.4 GHz, 512 MB DDR 2700, WinXP Pro, WinRAR 3.0

Now to the problem. When I used WinRAR on my old machine, the extract screen came up right away, (although it took forever to unrar!), but now when I double click on a file to uncompress it, Winrar sometimes takes a full 45 sec. to a min. to open the dialog. I should note that I typically am uncompressing rather large spanned files, 500-800 MB, but I was doing that before on my old machine. At first I thought maybe I had a setting on to error check each spanned volume before uncompressing the files, but I found nothing of this sort. Any advice?

Thanks,
AJ:huh

[Lion7718]

Do you have any programs running in the background that you didn't have before?

[ajtip]

Nope, same stuff as before. Which ain't much; Norton Firewall and Antivirus (w/ auto protect off.) I've checked all the obvious things I could think of. (such as indexing being on, etc.) Thanks for the suggestion though.

[cyberrico]

Did you format and start over or did you just put new components in with your old drive?

It sounds like you know what you're doing. Maybe WinRAR's corrupted. Have you been on the same system for a long time? I find that no matter how careful I am, I need to format and start over from time to time.

All I know is that WINRAR should scream even with your old system. Either form of lag is completely inappropriate.

[ajtip]

Did you format and start over or did you just put new components in with your old drive?

When I bought my new system everything was new, including the HDD. This has really got me stumped! I do remember a recent thread (can't find it) dealing with a windows update that slowed down someones system. If anyone can remember what update it was, maybe I can try uninstalling it.

Thanks for the effort,
AJ

[cyberrico]

Oh man, that is weird. Let me get this straight:

-Everything in your new computer is new.
-Fresh install of new operating system (xp)
-No ghost image backup restored on new drive.

Ona pentium II WinRAR should do everything lightning fast. On a Pentium IV it should do it yesterday.

Something you're installing must be corrupt. Are you downloading a fresh copy of WinRAR or is it a copy you had on your old system that you backed up? Perhaps you have a bad copy of office or your o/s that you got off Kazaa or something and it's having a direct impact on WINRAR. It can't be anything else. Maybe you got a virus on something you installed in this new system. Perhaps you cleaned the virus, but the file is now corrupt enough to be virus free and installable but is unstable in its extracted installed form.

Maybe your RAM is bad. Bad RAM can screw anything up in small strange ways.

Good luck.

[Lion7718]

Originally posted by ajtip
I do remember a recent thread (can't find it) dealing with a windows update that slowed down someones system.

That was Update 811493

[cyberrico]

BTW, some updates can slow you down, but I'd bet anything that isn't your problem.

If you're that concerned about it just get SP1 and ignore the rest for now. I know that SP2 is supposed to be a dog, so wait on that one if you can even get it in the first place.

[ajtip]

Thanks guys. I'll figure this out eventually. By the way, can either of you recommend a utility to test RAM? (actually test speed and latency of every address.)

[cyberrico]

No, all RAM utilities I have used in the past suck. I'll find one for you though.

[cyberrico]

Ok, here's the best RAM utility I could find:

RAM UTILITY 3.2

It's a longshot, but maybe it is memory.

[ajtip]

Thanks, I'll try it out tonite.