Hi,

I recently bought a new laptop and it is a fair bit faster than the 3 yo one it replaced and has plenty of ram so am a bit confused why FileMaker is running about 10 times slower. It's making life a little frustrating to say the least.

Apart from the older laptop having a slower processor, the main differences bewtwen the 2 laptops are that the last one was XP and no Norton 360 and this new one is Vista with Norton...(I'm using the same FM on this one as the last one)

I'd really appreciate any suggestions as to what may be the issue...

cheers

1) Make sure that Norton is not scanning any directories with your FileMaker files in them (not the program, but the actual database files). I personally despise Norton because in my experience it's a resource wh**e. I opt for Kaspersky instead, but it might not be your issue.

2) Post the Specs of your Laptop. Vista hogs a lot more resources than XP does and even if your laptop is "Made for Vista" it may only just reach that margin. I probably wouldn't run vista with anything under 4 gb of ram - run the performance information tool in control panel and see what score you got - particularly under process, ram and hard disk.

3) Hit Ctrl+shift+esc, go to processes and make sure that nothing is hogging excess memory. Common culprits are firefox which will sometimes go up to 300-400mb's and the windows desktop bar which will sometimes go to 500-800mb's.

4) If this is not a laptop that comes with a factory install (i.e. not Dell/HP/IBM etc), make sure you have installed all the up to date drivers for your motherboard etc.

Take a look at this as well: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/help/83ec0ffe-ee04-4d53-8b87-25d1f05c954e1033.mspx

thanks for responding Genx,

I did the ctrl-shift-esc...iexplorer was using 90 mb and FileMaker about 50, everything else was tiny.

I will have to work out if Norton is scanning the actual database files.

Toshiba Satellite notebook, from harvey norman

RAM: 4 GB

Processor: 585 @ 2.16 GHz

32 bit operating system

and I got a score of 3.5

going by this info, do you think it's possible I don't have up to date drivers?

I'll check out that link now...

and I got a score of 3.5

What were the sub scores in each of the categories?

It said

Processor: 4.3

RAM: 4.9

Graphics: 3.5

Gaming Graphics: 3.5

Primary Hard Dsik: 5.2

Are you still using version 8.5 on this new system?

Yep

FMP 8.5 is not Vista-compatible. You need FMP 9.0 or later.

Oh dear

I thought 8.5v2 addressed the Vista problems.

I just had a look, I have FMP 8.5 v1