Video memory?

[Mustang]

Is it thrashing the disk?

When this sort of thing happens it generally means the application behind has been mostly swapped out, so before it can draw its window the OS has to reload the application's painting code from the hard disk.

It doesnt seem to overly thrash the disk.

Any suggestions for what to check and/or do in this situation?

[DimPrawn]

Spend £399 (inc VAT) on a new laptop like this with 3GB of RAM and a dual core Intel processor.

http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/pro...ps-_-position1

Give the old one to charity.

[pmeswani]

Give the old one to charity.

Or convert it into a Linux server of some sort?

[Mustang]

Spend £399 (inc VAT) on a new laptop like this with 3GB of RAM and a dual core Intel processor.

http://www.comet.co.uk/shopcomet/pro...ps-_-position1

Give the old one to charity.

Once I am off the bench that is exactly what I intend to do!!

[VectraMan]

I had a look at the BIOS in my Dell Latitude laptop earlier, and sure enough you can change the amount of reserved video ram. So following my own advice I've changed it from "auto" (which says 128MB if you have >768MB) to the minimum 32MB. So now task manager says I have 2013MB total compared to 1900-ish before.

I also found a setting that puts the hard disk into performance - but noisier mode.

Maybe it's all coincidence, but I've been using it (with VS2005 no less) for the last hour or so and it seems to be running a lot faster than it was before. Hmmm.