Copying takes a long time

[A Coyle]

Hi

I have Win XP SP1, ~1GHz, ~500MbRam

Copying anything other than trivial amounts of data seems
to take a very very long time. On my older computer with
Win2000, copying a table from my excel sheet is basically
instant, now it sits there for about 5-10secs with the
pointer an hourglass.
Copying a results table from my Access database (~17000
rows, 5 cols) was instant on my old computer, now it takes
around 20secs.
Often I get the message something like "Item to big for
clipboard, not saved". Never get this message on my old
computer using EXACTLY the same files. Even if I empty
the clipboard it does not speed the copy process up.

Has anyone else had this problem and figured out how to
fix it? Does anyone know what I can do?

Thanks in advance
A Coyle

[Lawrence]

You may have 500+ MB of RAM, but is it being used efficiently?

1) Run through this.... http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm
It might help you quite a bit.

2) Also, have you Defragged in a while? Chopping up files through the
course of normal work, and having them spread all over your drive is
inevitable, unless you run Defrag periodically. You'll probably want to run
chkdsk/f first, though, to prepare for Defrag.

3) Finally, have you taken a *cautious* peek at all of the programs you have
running in the background? (And do you want them to?)
Click Start/run/ type msconfig/ then click on the STARTUP tab, and have a
look. All of those things launch at startup. A good rule of thumb is, if
you do not know what it is for, do not turn it off....

Hopefully others will have better suggestions, too, but these few have made
a world of difference on several machines I know of, particularly item 2.

Good luck,
-Lawrence in Seattle


"A Coyle" > wrote in message
...
> Hi
>
> I have Win XP SP1, ~1GHz, ~500MbRam
>
> Copying anything other than trivial amounts of data seems
> to take a very very long time. On my older computer with
> Win2000, copying a table from my excel sheet is basically
> instant, now it sits there for about 5-10secs with the
> pointer an hourglass.
> Copying a results table from my Access database (~17000
> rows, 5 cols) was instant on my old computer, now it takes
> around 20secs.
> Often I get the message something like "Item to big for
> clipboard, not saved". Never get this message on my old
> computer using EXACTLY the same files. Even if I empty
> the clipboard it does not speed the copy process up.
>
> Has anyone else had this problem and figured out how to
> fix it? Does anyone know what I can do?
>
> Thanks in advance
> A Coyle