Workstations that run slowly.....

[Hyperus]

Another tid-bit from Hyp that may assist with general workstation speed. This will be centred around workstation speed only and assumes you already have a fast reliable server, but find users are complaining about the package being slow when in fact its the general workstation health that may in fact be a major contributing factor to the slow performance.

This is always a bit of a hard topic, as slow workstation cause can vary for so many different reasons. Just a few below :-

Slow Hard Drives (for example 5400 RPM hdd's on notebooks)
Low Ram - this causes excessive hard drive activity (page file swapping)
Spyware/Adware
Viruses
Low quality/unreliable antivirus software
Old network card drivers
Low quality network cables
Faulty cat5 patch panels/wall cabling
Cat5 wall cabling closer than 12 inches to flourescent lights
Faulty network switch hardware
Hubs (yuk)

and the list goes on... I'll try to outline below a few basics that can sometimes assist in a 'tune-up' of sorts to assist not only general workstation speed, but of course try and make jiwa much more responsive. The following steps assume you are using Windows XP Pro SP2. Windows 2000 Pro and Vista simply run much more slowly when run on the same hardware as Windows XP making Windows XP by far the more efficient choice - especially for older hardware.

1. Check that you have a bare minimum of 1GB ram (preferably 2GB) ... These days running Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Jiwa, 5 Internet Explorer Web Browsers, etc etc, the memory used by all of these applications can really start to add up.

2. Disable any themes/backgrounds - these can use up memory and cpu resource under some circumstances. They can also force the cpu to keep redrawing/updating the display wasting cpu time that can be better used on other applications.

3. Download and Update your network drivers - preferably Microsoft WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) Certified versions.

4. Download and Update your video drivers - - preferably Microsoft WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) Certified versions.

5. Download and Update your printer drivers - - preferably Microsoft WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) Certified versions. YES ! - printer drivers... these are one the MOST important aspects... it is not well known but this is why. Microsoft windows software typically uses WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) to display items in your applications. While this output does use your display driver, it also uses your printer driver to render output. This process can be easily affected by BUGGY printer drivers - far more than most users know about.

... to be continued

[Mike.Sheen]

Spyware/Adware

Yep, I'll +1 that.

I've seen a workstation that was running woefully slow when running Jiwa. After running FileMon and Regmon, we discovered that some process named Zango (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zango) was intercepting the Jiwa calls to files and regkeys and thereby slowing the system down greatly.

If you do see a workstation running really slow, and have tried the obvious trouble-shooting, fire up FileMon and / or RegMon and see what happens when you actually fire up Jiwa. If you see strange processes (Like "Zango") suddenly kick in and access Jiwa.XML or anything, then you need to investigate further. All official product related processes are named Jiwa*.