JorgeA

BlouBul, That's an interesting idea. Trouble is, my other modern computer (a laptop) has Norton 360 on it, too. I also have MS Word on three other PCs, but they are a Windows 98, a Windows 98SE, and a Windows for Workgroups 3.11. I'd be surprised if the opening times on those systems could be compared usefully to this machine. --JorgeA

BlouBul, Thanks for pitching in! I disabled Norton Antivirus and opened the same file in Word off the RAMdisk. Load time was 2:59, compared to 3:05 when I did the same thing before disabling the AV. Next thing to try will be doing it in Safe Mode, as you and CoffeeFiend have suggested. LOL --JorgeA

dencorso, I downloaded and installed Crystal DiskMark, and ran the tests as you suggested. I'm attaching the screenshots. Let me know what you think. I use Norton 360, and its various functions are pretty well integated into my computer: Safe Search for IE, AntiSpam for Outlook, firewall and AV are resident. I also have Online Backup. Therefore I really would prefer to leave N360 alone and wait a few minutes for a Word file to load, than to uninstall and reinstall (and re-register) it. The PITA factor just isn't worth it. The CPU Meter normally hovers between 4 and 8 percent, with occasional spikes, when N360 is running. It's not really an intolerable drain on my resources. The earlier version that I had on my Win98 PC really was a resource hog, though. --JorgeA CrystalMark Screenshots.pdf

puntoMX, Hola, ¿qué tal? Good to hear from you again. But man, that would be a radical measure! Would you want to leave Norton out permanently, or only for the duration of the test? --JorgeA

dencorso, Thanks for the tip. I downloaded the Professional Version trial and installed it, then copied the Word file to it and opened it in Word. Load time was 3:03. Out of curiosity, I then closed the file, went back into the hard disk, and opened the original copy of the file from there, again in Word. Load time: 3:03. Amazingly, the RAM disk seems to have made, literally, no difference! --JorgeA

CoffeeFiend, O.K., we can rule out a network printer. I'm not using printer sharing on the network. I'll try opening the file in Safe Mode tomorrow. Late last night I cleaned out the Registry with CCleaner (it removed 113 broken entries), and the load time went down to 2:47. Still not great, but better. Thanks for the idea. --JorgeA

CoffeeFiend, Thanks a bunch for the diagnostic. The thought of malware did cross my mind. However, I regularly run my PC through (1) Norton Internet Security, (2) Windows Defender, (3) Spybot Search & Destroy, and (4) Eset NOD Online Scanner, plus (5) the MS Malware Removal Tool. We know that no single security application is perfect, but it would have to be a heckuva malware program to get past all five of these. Of these, Norton and Spybot are resident. We can imagine that they'd slow things down, but when nothing else but them is running my CPU Meter hovers between 01% and 25% or thereabouts -- hardly enough to account for the slow loading speed. And Norton hasn't been set to scan Office files as they're opened. When I opened the test file tonight again, CPU usage topped out at about 74%, and more often was bouncing around the 25% mark even as the file was loading. Regarding a network -- I do have my PCs on a home network, but I don't have a server and file sharing is not enabled on this computer. Still... is there a way to find out whether Word is spending time checking to see if another computer is using the file? If it helps, I notice that for that 501-page file it starts off very slowly, loading some 3 pages at a time like molasses, till it gets to a certain point (near the halfway mark) and then it starts adding pages quickly. What else could affect load time? Could the number of open IE windows have a bearing on it? (I'm groping for other possible culprits.) Anyway, it sounds like getting an SSD wouldn't cut down noticeably on file loading time even in the best of cases. (You may have saved me a bundle of dough here, thank you!) So what's all the rage about regarding SSDs? --JorgeA

Derek, Thanks for the idea, I hadn't thought of that. Norton 360 claims that my disk is just 1% fragmented, though, so assuming that N360 is accurate then that shouldn't be the source of the problem. Assuming... --JorgeA

dencorso, You gave me a lot to chew on! I'll look into these various possibilities. Hmm, I haven't used a RAMdisk since the good old days of DOS. I thought the whole concept had died a natural death with the advent of big RAM capacities and OS's able to utilize them. How about that. --JorgeA

dencorso, Whew! What a relief, thanks! --JorgeA

Hello, In my line of work I deal with some fairly hefty (4MB, 13MB) MS Word files featuring a mix of text and graphical elements, and I've noticed that they can take a loooong time to load before I can start working on them. Yesterday, as a test, I opened a 13,746KB file and started a stopwatch. Three minutes and 20 seconds of thumb-twiddling later, the file finally finished loading. It doesn't seem to matter what other programs I do or don't have running at the same time. Therefore I'm thinking that maybe if I put these files on a solid state drive, I could load (and save) them faster and no longer need to sit around waiting or finding something else to do in the meantime. FWIW, I use Vista Home Premium x64, and my PC (a factory-spec HP a6512p) has 4GB of RAM and a Pentium Dual E2200 CPU. I also use ReadyBoost (it does seem generally to speed things up for me). Needless to say, I don't have any USB 3.0 ports. My research indicates that Vista doesn't support the TRIM command that helps to keep SSDs running faster for longer. But then I would only be using the SSD to store Word files, so it would take a long time to fill it to the point where performance would start getting affected. (And many SSD manufacturers have their own software to clean out their drives.) The most important question is: Is installing an SSD likely to significantly speed up loading and saving my Word files? Thanks for any insights or information you might have on this! --JorgeA

dencorso, What's the drawback of the Norton Protected Recycle Bin? I have one on my Win98. What do I need to watch out for? --JorgeA

Sure. It's a must for security. Hope it doesn't give you a hard time, too. dencorso, Will do. Thanks again! --JorgeA

dencorso, Put another feather in your cap -- it worked!! Thanks a million! This is great. I was able to do the Shields Up! tests, and the PC passed. Interesting that it could load the https page even without the High Encryption Pack. Should I go ahead and download+install that anyway? One more thing. Now that my WfW 3.11 machine has elements of Windows 98 (emm386.exe, himem.sys) grafted onto it, can I call the system Windows 3.98 ? --JorgeA

Jake, Maybe I should try this idea (to get the emm386 for DOS 6.22) next. Grafting the two Windows 98 files onto the 3.11 system didn't crash it, but they didn't help with the installation of IE5 (or IE4), either. Unless there's some other tweak to try first. I repeat once more how delighted I am with this forum, where folks pitch in to help with the most esoteric and obscure problems that people run into! --JorgeA

dencorso, I have an update. I copied EMM386.EXE and HIMEM.SYS over from my Win98 tower to the 3.11 PC (I renamed the old files in case I need to bring them back), and rebooted. Rebooting went fine, which was a relief. Then I tried to run the installation program for IE5 -- and I got the same message as before about not running on less than 4 megabytes. For good measure, I then also tried to install IE4, and I got a different but related error: "There is not enough memory to start the specified application. Quit one or more applications, and then try again." (I didn't have any other programs running.) What can we do next? Maybe I'll try the EMM386.EXE for DOS 6.22 that triger49 suggested. Anything else? --JorgeA

dencorso, Thanks for the info. As you know, I do have Win98 (in both flavors), so getting copies of each of these will be a snap. Triger49 suggested going to the Microsoft site for an updated version of emm386. Should I try that first? --JorgeA

Jake, Thanks very much for the tip! Probably the most straightforward way to set emm386 will be to delete the old one and copy the new version in. After all, we're talking about DOS here... I recently added Win32s to that system, so I should be all set there. I'm seeing your post at the same time as dencorso's, who suggests using an emm386 from Windows 98. Maybe I'll see first if I can use the one that you give, if only to keep the system "within the 3.11 family" as much as possible. Then if that doesn't work, I'll try the Win98 version. --JorgeA

jaclaz, Hello again! Umm... I guess I won't tell you, then, that I still have all the vinyl LPs I ever purchased, or that I recently had my Betamax VCR refurbished and it works great!! Thank you for the heads-up on Steve Gibson and his work. I've been catching up on his weekly "Security Now!" podcasts, listening to them in the shower. (Maybe I shouldn't tell you that, instead of using something like an iPod, I burn them onto CDs and listen on a -- Sony Walkman! ) Can you point me to an alternative website that will test my PCs for exposure on the Internet? That's the main reason I go to grc.com. (Obviously it's not something that I need to do very often, but I would like to test the ol' 3.11 machine.) And thanks for the tip re: Opera. If I can't get any version of IE to work on that computer AND load 128-bit encrypted pages, I will definitely look into it. --JorgeA

Steven, Thanks anyway! --JorgeA

Svenne, Well, that would settle it for IE5. I'll give IE4 a shot (it IS newer than IE3) and if that doesn't work either, then I'll do IE3. Thank you. --JorgeA

dencorso, Great to be in touch again! It's MS-DOS 6.20. (Yeah, not even 6.22.) The timestamp for both HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE is 11-03-93, and the file sizes are 29,136 and 120,926, respectively. Hope this helps in figuring things out. Let me know if you need any more info on those two files. --JorgeA

Glenn9999, Thanks for the idea. Here's what I have: MEM.EXE reports the following: Memory Type Total = Used + Free Conventional 640K = 48K + 592K Upper 123K = 123K + 0K Reserved 0K = 0K + 0K Extended (XMS) 65,349K = 2,357K + 62,992K BIOS Setup does correctly report the whole amount of RAM installed (130,000-odd KB). But even 64MB is plenty more than 4MB. What do you think? --JorgeA

@Kelsenellenelvian @Mijzelf @Glenn9999 @GrofLuigi Thanks very much for all the ideas and suggestions! I downloaded IE 5.01 16-bit. But when I tried to install it, I got a "System Memory Check" message informing me that, "Microsoft Internet Tools for Win 3.1/NT 3.51 requires a configuration larger than 4 megabytes for reasonable performance. On smaller machines, please continue to use previous version of Internet Explorer." Scratching my head at this -- I have 128MB of RAM in the PC, which is just a tiny bit larger than 4MB. Is there a way around this? An alternative (assuming that I don't run into the same memory issue) might be to try IE4 and the corresponding High Encryption Pack. Too bad they don't have one for IE3. I'll try it if we can't solve the memory issue for IE5. Much appreciated! --JorgeA

Friends, Does any of you know what is the most recent version of Internet Explorer that will run on Windows for Workgroups 3.11? (Yes, I'm still tinkering with that "museum piece"...) The machine has IE 3.0, but when I went to test the machine on Steve Gibson's "Shields UP!" security page, I discovered that it won't go on sites featuring 128-bit encryption. (At least, that's what I speculate the problem is. The Shields UP! page on grc.com is https. The computer seems to have no trouble loading regular http pages, even on the grc.com site.) I found a version of IE5 in German somewhere, but not an English version. Can anybody point me to a safe place from where I can download it? Are there any other versions of IE that will do https AND work on WfW3.11 ? My Web surfing on this machine would be extremely limited, basically to test its security on grc.com and to go to specific sites (found to be safe by my more modern systems) to download utilities. Thanks for any help you might offer. --JorgeA