Hope you can help me by thinking this puzzle through?
Laptop is a Vaio with XP. When working overseas I use a Vodafone dongle if there's no hotel wifi. Either way, it works fast and well. Recently our purchasing manager handed me a spare dongle to try. It didn't work so our IT bloke had a fiddle with the laptop, changing a few settings.
The dongle still doesn't work, the old dongle does work. Now however the laptop is taking 20-30 seconds to open any application like Firefox, anything on the Start menu, any folder on the desktop. BUT.... any Word or Excel document with a shortcut on the desktop still opens instantly. When the laptop is connected to the network cable at the office it all works impeccably with no delays.
The IT bloke says he hasn't changed anything. I can't do a system restore because it's not permitted by admin. Can anybody figure out from the symptoms I've described, what the laptop is doing when off the network cable that makes it so slow to open up most applications, except those documents with direct shortcuts?
It's got to be something to do with searching for that non-functioning dongle I guess but as an IT illiterate user I'm at a loss. I'm beginning to think our IT bloke is another in a long line of muppets we've employed then realised were no good. I need to get this thing working properly before going away on my next overseas trip or it's going to drive me nuts.
Laptop is a Vaio with XP. When working overseas I use a Vodafone dongle if there's no hotel wifi. Either way, it works fast and well. Recently our purchasing manager handed me a spare dongle to try. It didn't work so our IT bloke had a fiddle with the laptop, changing a few settings.
The dongle still doesn't work, the old dongle does work. Now however the laptop is taking 20-30 seconds to open any application like Firefox, anything on the Start menu, any folder on the desktop. BUT.... any Word or Excel document with a shortcut on the desktop still opens instantly. When the laptop is connected to the network cable at the office it all works impeccably with no delays.
The IT bloke says he hasn't changed anything. I can't do a system restore because it's not permitted by admin. Can anybody figure out from the symptoms I've described, what the laptop is doing when off the network cable that makes it so slow to open up most applications, except those documents with direct shortcuts?
It's got to be something to do with searching for that non-functioning dongle I guess but as an IT illiterate user I'm at a loss. I'm beginning to think our IT bloke is another in a long line of muppets we've employed then realised were no good. I need to get this thing working properly before going away on my next overseas trip or it's going to drive me nuts.
