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My PC is running pretty quickly and pretty responsively. The only one problem it seems to have is with system alerts (Message boxes, not tool-tips). Often, yet not always, they are slow to draw. The box pops up and buttons slowly show up afterwords. It isn't slow to the point that I'm waiting, but slow to the point that you'd never miss seeing the way it slowly draws. First the box appers with blank buttons, then it loads in the text for those buttons. This doesn't happen everytime, but it is frequent.

I have tried reinstalling all system drivers from the mother-board manufacturer's website. This did not help. The only thing I can think of is it almost acts like it is out of graphical handles. However, it NEVER fails to draw, it's just slow. So I'm not too certain about that conclusion.

Does anyone know what could cause this (remember, the rest of my system is quick and responsive). Also, does anyone have an idea of where I could find a program that can monitor the amount of available graphical resources (such as drawing handles)?

Quick note about my PC:

I am NOT running a high-end PC. I have 2GB of ram and a celeron E3400 @ 2.66 GHz running Windows XP SP 3.

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You haven't provided much information about the nature of these alerts. Taking a stab in the dark, I'd guess one of:

1 These are not real system alerts, but fake ones being displayed by a browser, for example. 2 The alerts are somehow related to graphics drivers, so that when you see an alert, your graphics subsystem is in a bad state. Hence, the graphics performance and alert rendering performance coincide. 3 Similarly, the alerts are related to some other bottleneck that can affect rendering, such as CPU load, or memory usage.

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The system-alerts, as I am calling them are standard system message boxes. They are not necessarily being alerted by the core system, they are just the alerts provided by the core system. The result is the same no matter which application launches the alert. My PC is not used for intense processing graphically or otherwise. And normal operating applications run in around 500MB of memory leaving 1.5GB clear. Also, the times when they are being slow are not really at times of high-processing. For example, closing note-pad when it asks if you want to save. That message often displays slowly. – Tim Apr 6 '12 at 13:23
If they're really standard system alerts, they'll render graphics in the same way as other windows, so there should be no difference in performance with them. – Lee Apr 6 '12 at 14:00
During a benchmark (Intel-Burn-Test) I was unable to reproduce the behavior, despite using 1gb of memory all to itself. It really seems to be sort of random yet frequent behavior. It is possible that this behavior occurs with all uses of CreateWindow API, however, I have not noticed any other slow behavior at all. – Tim Apr 6 '12 at 16:21
Ahh. Well, slow in all cases of CreateWindow is quite different from slow just on alerts. CreateWindow is quite a heavy operation, allocating/moving/copying buffers, flushing caches, possibly drawing shadows around window borders (vista etc.) and so on. I wouldn't be that surprised if you're seeing slow performance there, while other things appear fast, just because the CreateWindow requires a bit more processing. – Lee Apr 6 '12 at 19:39

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