[j450n74y]

hi i did a search and couldnt find anyone with this issue.

I have problems with my dell mini 9 which is running win xp home edition with SP3.

CPU N270 @ 1.60GHZ, 1gb of ram

When i'm surfing on firefox or just general navigating, the laptop jams and locks up for 1 sec at a time. this happens intermittently, and i cant seem to figure out whats triggering it. Im not doing anything intensive to cause this, and an example is when im just clicking the scroll bar down, it locks up and i cant move the mouse pointer for 1 second. and then it'll continue back to normal.

Anyone else experience this or know how to fix it?

Thanks!

[bsoplinger1]

Sounds like the standard lockup you get while waiting on a slow SSD. Check out the threads on upgrading the SSD and you should find descriptions that sounds similar to yours.

Check out the drive light thread in the hardware forum for mention of software solutions you can try. That should let you see if each hangup in accompanied by SSD access.

[reflex]

System-wide stuttering is common on cheap SSDs. But software tweaks can reduce or eliminate the problem.

To reduce disk I/O, I recommend turning off the Firefox disk cache, or moving it to a RAM disk. Another tweak you could try is setting "toolkit.storage.synchronous" to 0 in Firefox, but that tweak might help more in Linux.

Aligning the partition should help, too. But that's easiest to do prior to OS installation.

[j450n74y]

hi guys ..thanks for that!
had a look..and had a few questions

1) hdd light software indicator.. this would just tell me when its reading so I know if its a problem caused by that, but not actually improve the problem (am i right in saying that?)..

2) given its a hdd problem, would adding a stick of ram in it help? looks like the only way i can fix this is by changing the SSD HDD, which i'm not comfortable doing, and had a look on ebay, and the cost of the runcore SSD HDDs are pretty pricey!

3) don't suppose adding a SD card in it would help this either?

4) don't suppose you could tell me if running OSX (which i've always wanted to try but haven't had a big enough usb key to do it) would change this either? Or windows 7? (not interested in running any other OS other then OSX or windows..)

5) my alternative is to sell my mini 9 off and get a mini 10. anyone had any experience and if there's anything better other the the screen size? haven't had a close look at it yet.. =X

[reflex]

1. A HDD light may help you diagnose the problem. But it won't help or hurt performance.

2. I don't think adding more RAM will help, unless you take advantage of the added RAM by disabling virtual memory at the same time. But also I think that VM is disabled by default, anyway. A new SSD may help, but as you know, they can be expensive.

3. SD card won't make a difference in any fashion.

4. OSX or Windows 7 may help, I don't know.

5. The Mini 10 is inferior to the 9 in many ways, I'd avoid it. The Mini 10v is virtually identical to the Mini 9, aside from the change to a standard laptop drive (SSD or HDD), instead of the Mini 9's tiny SSD. I don't know how prone the 10v's SSDs are to stuttering. A 10v with a standard hard drive should be fine.

But in the end, I think software makes a big difference. I've spent some effort tuning my Mini 9 with the slow 4GB STEC SSD running Linux, and I've been very happy with the speed.

[Vanamonde]

You need to turn off the pagefile in XP. Even though the guide is for the EeePC, the instructions for disabling the pagefile are valid for the mini 9: i64X.com - nLite Windows XP Install on Asus Eee PC Just search for pagefile on the page. Once I did this, lag was much reduced.

[grungysquash]

I have had identical problems when using firefox - everything runs fine then it will lock up, for as you say a few seconds before returning to normal.

I run AGV anti virus which includes a plugin, I have found that by disabling this plugin most of the issues have gone away. Have also googled this problem a few times and have considered some of the above suggestions relating to firefox but have no done these.

My lock-ups are only with firefox - never use IE8 simply because it's so sllloooooww to render a page.

I have no other issues with the laptop, which I use for work every day - hooked up to a 1900x1080 24inch display am running XP Pro SP3, 2 gig ram, 64 gig runcore SSD, and use office 2007 without any other real issues.

[randomspecific]

I also was having issues with lag/hangups and found that it was AVG. I also switched from Safari on windows to Chrome and have seen no shuttering since.