Sorry, but another slow computer

XP Home (SP3) 32-bit - MSI 760GM-E51 Mobo - AMD Sempron 140 CPU - Maximum DDR3 Ram allowed of 4gb. Hi everyone, Thought l'd start another thread and not tag on to wcts17skippy's thread, as my problems may be completely different. First off, my computer is squeeky clean. There are no unwanted files, registry has been cleaned, there is no malware, spyware, or viruses and the disks have all been defragged. I have one session open for IE and every time l fire off ConvertXtoDVD, IE grinds to near halt. Starting up anything else is also a no no as everything is so blimmin' slow. Now l know ConvertXtoDVD is a ram hogging program, but my specs are pretty dayam good are they not? So how can l strike a balance to get everything working in unison at reasonable speeds? Regards WTC

Hello willythecat, Sorry to hear you're having problems. Unfortunately I don't think a Sempron 140 is going to have enough beef to convert any video. It's the cheapest and lowest end CPU that you can buy new from AMD. How does everything else run without ConvertXtoDVD? Cheers, Nahumi

Thanks Nahumi, Without Convertx, everything else seems reasonably ok, well by my standards anyway. It's just when this runs when it slows it all down. Possibly nothing can be done, but just seems strange as to why it takes over the whole computer, leaving no room to manouver. Regards

that cpu only has 1 core to do the work unlike most others nowadays, so when it has to do multiple tasks it means it has to keep stop and starting the work for one task to work on the other, now when the task are not very cpu intensive like surfing the web then you don't notice this stop/starting because the cpu is able to do the work fast enough to do more than 1 tasks, but if one of the tasks like coding video's is being done which is very cpu intensive then the other task, using ie, has to wait for the cpu to finish it's work and this is what you notice when your browser becoming sluggish. that's why today you'll find a dual core cpu as being the minimum people recommend that way 1 core could be working on the encoding and the other on the web browsing with ie. and you wouldn't notice any slow down of ie. even with a dual core tho encoding a video would take ages so usually if you know your going to be doing such work you'd want to buy a cpu with the most cores(real or virtual) you could afford, even if it was slightly slower than a fastest cpu with less cores. eg. 8 men digging a hole at 5 shovel fulls each a minute would complete the hole sooner than 6 men digging at a faster rate of 6 shovel fulls each a minute.

Yeah, Terry has hit the nail on the head. Essentially, if you want to do video encoding you need to have a more powerful machine. Even with multiple cores, you may notice slowdowns. You would have to manually restrict ConvertX to one core and restrict IE to the other. Even if you do that, you might notice a bit of a slow down.

Thank you Terry and Nahumi. Absolutely understand it now with that explanation (easy when you know the answer!) Luckily, l'm not using video programs all the time, so will reschedule when l run them. Thanks again for your detailed and prompt replies. regads