I have a 550 Pentium PC that runs on a cable modem. It's pretty quick, ordinarilly. When I log on to cars and parts, it's fast but when I go to tech talk, it slows WAAAAY down. Am I doing something wrong?

Toby,

Al and Dennis can correct me if I'm wrong but Cars & Parts is more of a static page. The pages (or posts) there don't have a bunch of fancy formatting with Smilies and all that. Just text on a colored background with the occasional picture. And I would think the database that holds everyone's For Sale ads is a LOT smaller than the Tech Forums. It takes time for the server to serve you up the forums because it has to search through the database for just what you want to see.

As far as the forums, there's tons more information broken up into individual posts with fancy formatting, pictures, links, etc. And the database that holds all the forums and everything that's in here is HUGE compared to Cars & Parts. It takes longer to get you the information. Plus there's always more members active at any given time in Tech than there is in Cars & Parts which slows it down some more also.

I'm sure there's more to how the two areas of TC work than that too. I doubt it's anything you're doing. Maybe go for a GForce 4 video card and a 2Ghz motherboard with 512Mb of RAM. smile.gif That should speed things up a little.

I'll add a bit to joe's reply. Both the ads and tech are ran by programs that generate the pages but the tech pages use quite a few tables to display the layout.
Tables are ok, but they do require more memory to display fast. If you are a bit low on ram, this will be noticeable.
If the page seems to take awhile with nothing happening and then, poof, it starts to fill in, that's an indication your machine is working too hard to create the display.

Let us know if this might be the problem. We can turn off some of the little post icons as that may speed it up a bit.

Thanks for the replys, guys. Al, The page just flashes on when it starts, there is no slow fill-in. It's just boom, and it's there. Maybe I need a tune-up.

When hitting the back botton, sometimes I have to wait for as much as 20 seconds for something to happen. When I want to add something to a thread, the same thing occurs.
I wish I knew how to check to see if I'm short on RAM. I'm sure I am in other, non computer, areas.

Toby, shoot me an email at work today and I'll give you some things to look for and check out if you want. jtrabold@adt.com