Slow Blender

[Grogyan]

Although i'm not an expert on ATi, I can tell you that that is the graphics chip set that I was talking about, sometimes companies use Intel integrated, which I know shares memory with the system.

I take it you're running XP SP2?

I don't know what PC company you bought it from or what the deal was at the time, if you could find that out, in particular, looking for "Shared memory" that would give good clue.

One approach is reverting your catatlyst drivers to an earlier version, a newer version can corrupt old equipment by mistake, happened to me once with my old nVidia GeForce2, leaving me with two driver versions depending on what I was doing, or game I was playing.

Another idea, is to open your "task manager", "Alt+Ctrl+Delete" keys pressed once will bring it up, select the "performance" tab, and watch the values for the Physical memory and "Page file useage", if this page file is constanlty climbing, then your out of physical memory, and the value for the physical memory would be quite high.

Also, depending on your hard drive space and speed, you should look to see if your hard drive FREE SPACE is at least 20% of your total hard drive capacity, other wise Windows complains, if you have a 5400 RPM hard drive, consider replacing it with a faster one as the read and write cycles will be faster and cause less jitter and lag when the page file is used for thephysical memory over flow.

I also go by the rule of thumb that during normal usage, that is not counting on graphics intensive games like Uru or Crysis or Unreal Tournament, should generally not take up much more than 50% of your total physical memory capacity, less is better.

Also shut down things like virus scanners that are set to always cecking for viruses, or any unused programs will free up memory.

Last thing to try is a full system defrag, some people have noted huge improvments when they did, even when they have never done a defrag, and considering the age of your laptop, that would be a good place to start.

[Nadnerb]

Guys, guys, woah.

How about you try this:
When blender starts to slow down over time, it is usually because you have performed a lot of editing operations, and the internal structure of the scene is more fragmented than before. When this happens, save your work to a blend file, close blender entirely, and then open the file. It should reload and run faster until you have made a lot of changes again.

The secret upside of this behavior is that you will probably end up with a nice version history of your work, and can revert to any of them if neccessary.

[Tinuviel]

I have an fujitsu siemens Amilo laptop (m1425 I think) Had it
for about 3 years. I did not find out anything about Shared memory.
Until recently I have had an old catalyst drive on my grafics. But do
not remember the version.
Because I had this problem before Christmas to, I formatted my laptop
and set it back to the original settings. After a while I started to get the same problem with Blender.
I have now tried the three last catalyst drives with the same result. I was careful and removed all old
versions before installing new ones.

I do use sp 2.

On drive C where I have my windows installed, I have 44 % free
space. Blender I have on my D. I have 79 % free
space there. I have my computer defragged often along with disk-cleaning.

I took up Task manager and watched for a while on what happened when
I used my PC for different things. (not sure if it means anything..)
Mine do not have the term "page file user". But everything seemed stable
except for use of cpu. That one went up and down like a yo-yo. If I
used blender it was on 90-100% for whatever I did. If I took up internet pages with a lot
pictures or ads that kept changing, my CPU varied between 30 - 80.

The Physical memory on my task manager said that the total was 523632, around
65000 to 100000 available. And system buffer around 200000.
On my RAM it says I have 512 MB and 131 MB is available.

I have shut down most of my programs that start when I turn on my computer. But my virus-scanner is always on. Turned that of made no difference.

Nadnerb: I have closed down blender and opened the file directly without opening Blender first. (I hope that was what you ment.) Same happpened. I going to try reistalling Blender nw and see if that makes a difference:-)

Edit: reistalled blender. It now works in wireframe pretty well. Shaded is still slow. But at least I can continue on my house now. Yeyyy!

[Grogyan]

I shoulda thought about that one last night when I did the write up.

Yes switching to wire frame will help considerable, but you should be able to get around in solid/shaded/textured modes as well

To me it sounds like you have no memory, but the task manager says otherwise

[Tinuviel]

Shaded do work as long as I do not try to select and change things. So for now I am switching between wireframe when I want to do something, and solid and shaded when I want to see how it looks:-) If I am lucky I get to by a new pc soon. Any recomandations?

[mar]

I didn't now must about the innerside of a computer but maybe I have a tool that can help.

You can find it when you download this program "advanced windows care 2 personal" for free from: http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html?Str=purchase.
When you have install the program, behind the section management there you can find the section memory.
Click that ,than you see a tool "smart ram" clean your Ram-memory with deep cleaning. That helps for a while to speed up your computer.
I hope it will help you.

[teedyo]

Another thing that can sometimes help significantly is to clean out your prefetch directory.

[Chacal]

Shaded do work as long as I do not try to select and change things. So for now I am switching between wireframe when I want to do something, and solid and shaded when I want to see how it looks

On my PC (P4 2GHz with 1 GB RAM) the "shaded" view causes tremendous lag and sometimes crashes Blender altogether. I have no problem with "solid" and "textured" though. I just learned to never use "shaded".

I'm looking into a new PC too. I'll start a thread for recommendations, no doubt we have several tech enthusiasts here who can help.

[mar]

Good idea Chacal, I am also thinking about a new computer. Some advices from the technical people is very usefull.

[Goofy]

Well all I can say is make sure your PSU(power supply) is good enough and theres room for more upgrades.

My specs are:
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+, MMX, 3DNow (2 CPUs), ~3.0GHz
2 gigs ddr2 ram
2 80gig sata drives(one boot other pagefile)
2 external 160 gig drives
X800xl pci-express 256mb(yea I know needs upgrades)

At the moment theres only 2 things I want to upgrade, ones the video and other is my PSU. old PSU is 500 watts and with everything I'm thinking the system is at its max untill the psu is upgraded.