vista "not responding" message

Hi.

I seem to get this message a lot, running programs, copying files, It can be a short as 5 seconds or as long as 30, But it 99% of the time the program resumes.

I have a quad core and 4gb of memory and 3GB of that is free, so what the hell!

I have done a number of full system wipes, not because of this, and the problem remains.

I am running vista64.

does anybody else have this problem?

thanks

John.

 

it sounds like a spyware/virus to me...
i cant be very helpful but i'd recommend to format wondows

 

I think it's just some of those vista quirks, it happened to me yesterday when transferring videos to my psp, the explorer stopped working popup appeared but the process actually continued in the background...

 

Or a network latency. Does it ever happen when not connected to a network?

Try running this when network connected and see if there's anything interesting ...


tasklist /svc
netstat -a -o -f | find /V "%COMPUTERNAME%:" | find /V "*:*" | find /V "Active Connections"

 

The "Not responding" message just means a program isn't responding to system events (messages from the OS). (Back in XP you would've just seen the program hang or freeze with no message.) Basically it means that the program is hanging for one reason or another. Although I think this can also happen if another program is eating all the CPU. So it could be a rogue driver or background process or something.

Try keeping a task manager window open. Look at the CPU graph and see if there are major CPU usage spikes. Also, in the processes tab, click Show processes from all users, and then sort by the CPU column (descending), and see what's using up your CPU.

You may also want to run msconfig and disable every startup process and every third-party service that you don't really need.

 

This may happen a lot if you are working over a network. If you are transfering from a local folder to a local folder and you are getting this message, then that may be a cause for concern.

 

I have a new netbook, the N10J A2, with the 1.6mhz Atom with 2 gig or Ram running on Vista Business. This is happening to me fairly often when I am first starting up. But after I run for a while it seems to go away. Once it hangs up, the window fades or grays out with the message that it is not responding, and there is no way to get the Task Manager to open (ctrl/alt/del) but instead I get a black screen with a small dialogue box appearing that says, "logon process has failed to create the security options." There is also a big red X with the message: "Failure - SecurityOptions." I am running F-Secure through Charter Cable Security Suite and I have very recently added a 4gig SD card (150x) for Readyboost. Does someone have an idea what might be up with my N10J A2 Asus?

 

I uninstalled Charter's Security Suite (F-Secure) and added AVG anti-virus (no viruses found) and the problem went away. I think the F-Secure was cauing a conflict of some sort. Since making the change, there have been NO "not responding" messages. Life is good.

 

Swarmer's description sounds like the correct one - basically, something in the OS outlasted its timeout timer, and the message sender, having gotten just the timed-out response to its message, kicked out the "not responding" error.

As others have pointed out, one of the primary culprits is typically network latency; however, you should check your event logs to see if anything relevant got logged there.

 

Programs which add shell entries also can cause these issues.

Try removing any non-Windows shell entries.