Has anyone had this happen? I might have expected this message online, but it has happened while I am preparing Word documents, and using a process to print pictures on my computer screen–not Internet images–as well. What causes this? :mad:
The usual first resort to a problem that defies an intuitive solution is to reboot. That almost always clears it up.
I usually get that message when opening a very large document or starting a very resource-intensive task. It doesn’t happen if you’re patient, and it goes away if you wait.
Other times, it’s just stuck and you’re hosed, but I usually find that if I give the system time to sort it out, it does.
If the problem is transient and fixes itself in short order, then it’s most likely because there’s a shortage of some necessary resource the program requires, and the most common culprit is memory (or sometimes just the CPU(s) being busy). Windows is a virtual memory OS, so the amount of physical memory in the computer is not a hard limit; instead, if some program demands large amounts of memory, Windows starts paging, which is the process of loading and offloading sections of physical memory content from and to disk. For various reasons Windows actually pages most of the time, but when a large memory-hogging application runs, the paging activity can become intensive and the application slows down so much that it may be perceived as non-responsive.
If the problem isn’t transient and the “not responding” message doesn’t go away, one of the application processes is probably hung. This can happen just due to coding bugs, or waiting for a software interlock (semaphore) that isn’t being released.
Among other things, my external disk drives power down when not in use. I get the “not responding” thing as the system is waiting for the disk drive to spin up again
Yes, I get exactly the same thing and I find it annoying as hell. I did find a fix for it on the net once but later had a hard drive crash and when I tried to find the fix again I had no luck.
I get it when I’ve been opening and closing multiple documents in memory-intensive apps (adobe). Reboot usually fixes it. Also repair permissions if it’s a mac.
This is my experience as well. But I should note that the amount of wait time can be several minutes, up to several hours. I would not be surprised if sometimes it takes days. The biggest problem is that there is no way to know whether waiting will help, or whether it is truly stuck. And that’s why some posters are advising you to reboot. Rebooting might not be the theoretically correct answer, but it is often the only practical solution.
What I tell my customers is that “not responding” is your computer getting impatient. It can indicate that there’s a legitimate problem (specifically that a program has crashed) or it can simply mean that whatever the computer is doing is taking longer than expected. Sometimes if you wait it out then it will finish.
Rebooting can be a good fix if you have programs crashing but that’s because rebooting your machine clears out memory and is often a good first step to fixing almost anything. You may be dealing with any number of problems from an outdated driver to a corrupt installation to a hardware problem. But yes even though it’s a cliche try a reboot first.