‘I
have a puzzle.
I’ve been using Fractint since 1991 and greatly appreciate the work of
Jim Muth
and Paul N Lee, as well of course the Stone Soup team.
‘My
current (my
sixth) PC is a Pentium III 800E bought in December 2000 and came with
Windows
98 SE. I recently had to accept the inevitable and upgrade to Windows
2000 –
not without hassle, …
‘Secondly,
if I
render a fractal the process seems to go very slowly unless I move the
mouse,
when it speeds up. I find this odd.
Paul
N. Lee kindly
replied, saying, in part:
‘You may also need to play with the various property settings that can be set for running the application, especially on the MISC and COMPATIBILITY tabs of the PROPERTIES, such as the IDLE SENSITIVITY.’
I have now again had to accept the inevitable and upgrade to Windows XP Home – again not without hassle, including among many things eventually having to junk my HP scanner as after 10 hours work and consulting HP support three times I couldn’t get a driver for it. (The Canon replacement is much better.)
I was
surprised
and delighted to find that I could run Fractint much as before, despite
doing a
clean install and letting Windows reformat my C drive as NTFS. I
fiddled with
the various property settings as Paul N. Lee suggested.
However there is a problem. If I render some fractals that take a fair time, like Lee H Skinner’s 6090168 (thank you for these), then unless I move the mouse every few minutes, I get a rude message from Windows saying that the pesky MD-DOS application was too slow responding to something and must be cancelled.