Dell 4500s sluggish & leaves trails when dragging windows

M

MacGyver

New Member
Dell 4500s sluggish & leaves trails when dragging windows
also uses 100% CPU when dragging a window around.

Is this a setting in XP like pointer trail setting? or does this
sound like a drive or hardware issue. It happens really bad
when Firefox is maximized and I drag a window accost it.
 
Well, first thing I would suspect is you running out of memory... Firefox, by default, has some extra security-features enabled that sometimes consume massive amounts of RAM (sometimes in excess of few hundred megabytes). Open your task manager, go to the performance tab, and see how much memory is used & cached.

My second guess would be problem with the display drivers... I once uninstalled my display drivers, and after that moving windows around, scrolling through web pages & such became extremely sluggish... reinstalling the drivers fixed it. You may want to try doing that... my CPU usage also shot up to 100% when I didn't have the drivers installed.
 
just loading dell’s support page my memory maxes out 1GB
physical memory
total-1046516
available-679040
system cache-277388

I also have choppy streaming video playback in full screen mode on fox.com or hulu.com and dropped audio.
I have the latest flash installed and most drivers from dell.
 
Excuse me!! but I went super cheep ass cheep and bought a dell
off craigslist for a $100, try building a system for that. lol
I do hate dell, my AMD 850mhz system is faster, was faster.
After 10 years it died (hardware) but it was faster than this 2ghz
dell with 1GB of RAM.

The guy I bought it from said he formatted the drive before the reinstall
for me, it was a fresh install with no signs of dell other then the new drivers
I installed.

Should I run the video drivers from dell or Intel?
 
Should I run the video drivers from dell or Intel?
Click to expand...
I would download the from the Dell website so that you surely get the right set of drivers; they'll probably redirect you to some of Intel's mirrors anyways, so in the end it doesn't really matter.
 
I ended up downloading it from intel, they scan the drivers and recommend
which one need upgrading.

It didn’t solve the problem though. I think it is only 64MB video RAM.
Should I buy a better PCI video card or is that a waist of money, no AGP slot.

In the bios settings there is an option for AGP though?? it is set to PCI.
 
The onboard video is probably AGP, which is why AGP is listed as an option. How old is the computer though? Chances are it has a PCI-Express slot... PCI-E cards are the most common (and cheapest) graphics cards around nowadays.

EDIT: Never mind, I looked up the specs, apparently it has no PCI-E... however, the specs sheet on dell's website said it has an AGP connector. Are you sure yours doesn't?
 
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I opened the case and didn’t see a brown slot, unless that is not a standard anymore??

The specs you looked up where they for a 4500S S= slim, I guess
Are PCI cards a joke compared to AGP 4x
 
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I opened the case and didn’t see a brown slot, unless that is not a slandered anymore??
Click to expand...
It doesn't have to be brown, AFAIK it is usually but I've seen other colors, sometimes black, white, navy blue, even bright green!
 
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