There are a number of reasons why RedSquirrel could run slowly. Firstly it is a very processor intesive program that requires quite a powerful PC to emulate even an old Archimedes machine. You should curently expect to get about 1 mip for every 100Mhz of processor speed you have on an intel PII/PIII processor. Software audio cards such as AC97 codecs will take a significant proportion of your processor time and slow down RedSquirrel.

Not all drivers are created equal. On my Laptop which has a Savage IX chipset, the Windows ME driver scales in hardware but the Windows 2000 driver does it in software. Until I change to mode 31 (800x600) with square pixels, RedSquirrel runs at 0.1 Mips under Win2k. If this happens to you, make sure you are running in 'software scale' mode.

It's Symantec Anti-Virus 10.x that causes this. The 7.x version was fast; the 8.x version was slower, but usable. With the 10.x version, it may take minutes between the time you login and the time you can actually get work done. Symantec withdrew support for 8.x in Feb 2007, so, sadly, we are stuck with 10.x. Unfortunately, the scan is generated for *each user*, so *each user* on each machine must do this.

You made the investment in your PC so that you could enjoy the benefits of a fast, easy machine that would make your life easier and more enjoyable. Unfortunately, after continued use, all PC’s suffer the effects of a corrupt and ineffective Windows Registry, causing error messages to appear, slow loading, and system crashes. Eventually, that machine that was supposed to make your life easier is now the source of your greatest frustration.

Well that's because this site is all about pictures, and most pages are made up of lots and lots of them. I could have had thumbnails and pop-up boxes but then you wouldn't be able to see so much without clicking on everything to bring up separate boxes. As fast internet connection has become more commonplace I decided to assume users will have this.

Unlike other PC Builders which are very limited in terms of which components you can use to build your PC, our PC Builder gives you access to 2,500 components so you really can build the ultimate PC. In order to provide you with this level of flexibility unforuntately it takes time to display this information. However, once the screen has loaded you have immediate access to all these components and there are no further delays.

Remember when you first took you new computer out of the box and everything worked so well and was so fast? And now, months or years later, all these nagging errors, pop-ups, and lockups keep happening. And everything is so slooooooowwwwwww……

Various issues may cause your PC to be slow at downloading. Viruses or spyware/malware can affect internet connection. If this is an issue with P2P programs such as Kazaa, Limewire, etc, these programs are blocked and are in violation of the Acceptable Use Policy.

Not significantly. In testing, slow down was only noticeable when working with very large (gigabyte or larger) files.

Yes - select the Draft command from the View menu. This selects draft mode (you will see a check next to the Draft menu command). This will slightly reduce the display image quality (the picture will be a little softer), but it will update much more quickly. Don't worry, this option has no effect on the image quality when the images are saved. If Portrait Professional still runs too slowly, make sure you have enough RAM (512 MB minimum recommended). Other than that, you need a new PC!

RedSquirrel is a machine emulator for a number of different hardware platforms based on the Arm processor and as such it is not OS dependent. It happens to be able to run RISC OS, an operating system written by Acorn, now owned by Pace. These are commercial products which I do not own and do not have a license to distribute or sell.

The first method is called 'Interpreted', is relatively easy to implement and test but is slow and mimics how the real processor works. Each instruction is fetched, decoded, and executed in turn. Each time that instruction is reached again it will be fetched, decoded and executed again. Fetching and decoding are surprisingly expensive and take a large proportion of the execution time - around 75%. Needless to say, this is the method currently used in RedSquirrel.

Vidc1, supported by RISCOS 2 and 3 had a limit of 512k for video/cursor/sound. Typically this means a limit of 480k. There were add on cards that supported more ram and these may one day be emulated. Machines with a separate IOMD supported 2Mb of VRAM and RedSquirrel will happily let you use up to 2Mb of ram for these machines Machines with the Arm7500 chipset only supported DRAM.

Yes, but there is no networking support so you cant browse the web. Hopefully soon I will release the plugin API and someone can write the networking support. It isn't important to me so I wont be writing it myself.

Some versions of the winsock library have bugs which cause this behaviour, try upgrading. We have found that winsock2.2 works correctly. Note that, starting with RAT v3.0.31 you are required to have version 2 (or later) of the winsock library to use RAT.

We are trying to improve the design of our website so that it is never slow. At this point we believe we have addressed all of the issues causing slowdowns when we have many users using the site at once. If you experience slowdowns, while the issue could be your computer or your ISP give us a call and let us know at 1-800-969-7228 and we will be able to investigate the problem.

There is a once-per-process-per-type overhead with XmlSerializer. So the first time you serialize or deserialize an object of a given type in an application, there is a significant delay. This normally doesn't matter, but it may mean, for example, that XmlSerializer is a poor choice for loading configuration settings during startup of a GUI application.

Public network exchange points are a good thing, but they often suffer from traffic congestion. The bottlenecks usually occur when an ISP has more data to get out of the exchange point than its connection can handle. Starting October 1, 2000 the 503 area code will be switching to 10-digit dialing. This will soon be true also in the 360 area code.

I have been testing various versions of this service pack for 6 months now. There were some "bugs" in the early "beta" versions, but this final PUBLIC release is very stable! I have personally been installing this Windows service pack 2 on every kind of computer I can get my hands on and only had one reboot issue that resolved itself on a second attempt! for slowing down computers...