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#1
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What does a flashing or blinking hourglass next to the cursor mean?
What does a flashing or blinking hourglass next to the cursor mean?
It appears and disappears, every half second or so, but at an inconsistent interval. It appears in a lot of programs, iirc at times when the whole computer is running slowly. . |
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#2
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What does a flashing or blinking hourglass next to the cursor mean?
micky wrote:
What does a flashing or blinking hourglass next to the cursor mean? It appears and disappears, every half second or so, but at an inconsistent interval. It appears in a lot of programs, iirc at times when the whole computer is running slowly. . Antivirus working ? |
#3
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What does a flashing or blinking hourglass next to the cursor mean?
"micky" wrote in message ...
What does a flashing or blinking hourglass next to the cursor mean? It appears and disappears, every half second or so, but at an inconsistent interval. It appears in a lot of programs, iirc at times when the whole computer is running slowly. . Possibly "Automatic Updates" running in the background. Ben |
#4
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What does a flashing or blinking hourglass next to the cursormean?
micky wrote:
What does a flashing or blinking hourglass next to the cursor mean? It appears and disappears, every half second or so, but at an inconsistent interval. It appears in a lot of programs, iirc at times when the whole computer is running slowly. . It means that the computer is busy. Use task manager to find out what. You can probably kill many of the processes without the computer shutting down. |
#5
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What does a flashing or blinking hourglass next to the cursormean?
Paul in Houston TX wrote:
micky wrote: What does a flashing or blinking hourglass next to the cursor mean? It appears and disappears, every half second or so, but at an inconsistent interval. It appears in a lot of programs, iirc at times when the whole computer is running slowly. . It means that the computer is busy. Use task manager to find out what. You can probably kill many of the processes without the computer shutting down. You can add to that "Process Explorer", which has an "Interrupts" entry near the top. That gives you one more counter to work with. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/s...rnals/bb896653 It's also possible, in the case of a couple Dell computers, for thermal throttling to make the CPU so slow, that any tiny task makes the system "busy". But that would also show when running an application, which would be dog slow. And that doesn't show in Task Manager or Process Monitor. It has to be inferred from the behavior. Or use CPU-Z and maybe you can catch the actual CPU frequency that way. Throttling happens on a lot of computers, but not the "Dell way", which was overkill by about a factor of ten, and involved some cleverness in design on Dells part. If the symptoms don't make sense, throttling is a remote possibility. If you see a svchost railing one core (staying in a loop), there was a bug in Windows Update, caused by the depth of recorded info about Internet Explorer patches. That seemed to get fixed, but how it was fixed isn't clear. To stop the symptoms (assuming you had a religious aversion to completing all your Windows Updates), is to make sure the "last Cumulative Update" for Internet Explorer browser is installed. You don't have to be using Internet Explorer. Just keep it patched, so the service in question doesn't go nuts. Paul |
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