Home Forums Discussions Problems Slow transitions Part II

I have been reading about folks having difficulty with transitioning between pages, opening imported labs, etc. I have tried some of the suggested changes but must admit I don't understand it all. Here is my set up.
ISP is from Adelphia cable which come into the building, to our modem and then to a switcher to the Dell Computer (Pentium D processor 2.66 ghz with 500 mg ram) which is used as the server. This is then connected to our wireless router switch and then to three lenovo lap tops (1.83 ghz with 1 gb ram). Each room is wired but we usually use the wireless system....less cumbersome with laptops. The problem is with the laptops and loading between the "most recent encounter" page and the "imported items". This can take up to 10-15 secs to transition. The real problem is opening the lab. Our lab is imported from labcorp and opening the results takes the same amount of time. Our radiology reports, consults, etc are scanned in using acrobat. Opening them isn't too bad.

None of these problems occur on the desktop Dell. I tried connecting the laptops through ethernet to the network and turned off the wireless. Some improvement in general (going form page to page within AC) but not much improvement opening labs from Labcorp.

There was a thread about this a few months ago but it just kind of petered out. Did anyone come up with a cure for the Labcorp blues? Do I just need more memory? Thanks for any suggestions.
Dave

I would try getting the RAM up to 2gb, especially if your laptop has a shared video memory configuration. www.crucial.com

One of the things I will also caution against is laptops without a dedicated video card. These machines are ALWAYS MUCH SLOWER, and reduce the amount of AVAILABLE RAM. So even though it says 1gb of RAM and a 128mb shared Video card, the amount of RAM you have available for applications is 1024 - 128.

Did the folks who were having problems with labcorp resolve their issues? Thanks for the suggestion of adding memory, also. Dave

And here's the reverse of the same idea. Check your start up folder and make sure you are only running the programs that you really need to be running. Free space in RAM is the same as adding RAM in many ways. But nothing wakes up a slow computer than a good stick of RAM... Certainly can't hurt.

Crucial is really good, they even scan your machine to make sure what you buy is a good match to your machine. But here's a twist. For some reason the scan program can't complete the scan of Nancy's Gateway laptop..... Good Luck!

Increasing the ram is right on target. One thing that you can try is to keep the processor from throttling down while on battery power. The processors on notebooks will slow down to conserve battery life at the expense of speed. Right click on "My Computer" and select properties. From there look at the listing for the processor speed/rating. Below that the actual speed of the processor will be displayed next to the RAM. My Lenovo thinkpad has a utility to adjust this setting, I am not sure how is it done through the windows interface. This may or may not help much. AC is not that demanding of a program.

Another issue is that these laptops are bundled with junkware. I have had to clean up and tune a lot of this thinkpad that I have to make is work well. It is fresh out of the box x61 tablet but the performance in WinXP sucked. I had to use MSConfig and services.msc to clean up the junk.

Hi, bought some more Ram and installed it. It has helped some...to the point the delay is tolerable. Just found out thought that all the desktops in the office are running XP Home Edition. There was a comment in some earlier post about buying XP Pro on Ebay. Any experience with that? I need to put it on 5 desktop machines. Does it come with that many licenses? Thanks Dave

David, there are a few things you can do.

Imagine your network is like the road network that gets you from home to work and back. How quickly and efficiently you make the trip depends on several factors and not only the type of car you drive. The roads, are there gates, tolls are any other things that impede your movement from one point to the next?

So when you look at your network, start with your SWITCH. Is it a 10/100 or is it a gigabit ethernet (100/1000). If it is a gigabit ethernet then you have a SUPERHIGHWAY.

Now what is the highest speed that each of the computers can enter this superhighway? For this you look at the network cards in each computer. If the card is a 10/100 then the maximum speed you it can put out and/or consume data is 100 or 1/10 the capacity of the network....BOTTLENECK.

If you have a wireless network, are you running 802.11b (11mbps) or g (54mbps)? Remember if you are running a g and you put a single B device on the network, it downgrades the entire network to b.

If you get the NETWORK up to speed then the only point of contention is the wireless card in you laptop; however, the data will be delivered as fast as possible.

Finally the issue of architecture cannot simple be overlooked. I have talked about that many times before and will not bore you with it!