How do I make Alice work?

[obik]

I've just started working my way through "Learning to Program With Alice" and I'm finding it literally impossible to do anything with the Alice software. It's so slow that I spent almost two hours last night just doing example 4 at the end of chapter 1. The software grinds away for minutes after every operation and the lag between clicking on a button and getting a response is ridiculous. My one attempt to do example 5 took three hours before the software froze--and at that point all I'd managed to do was turn one soldier around.

I'm running Win2k (virus/spyware free) on a Athlon 1.2 ghz processor with 128 megs of RAM. Alice is version 2.0

Are there any fixes or tricks to speed things up? I have tried reinstalling Alice. It doesn't help.

[pausch]

It's impossible to know for sure, but I strongly suspect the problem here is that you are memory-starved. While we cite 128 meg as the minimal acceptable RAM configuration, Alice runs slowly with that little RAM. I would suggest making sure all other applications are closed, and that you're not launching other applications at startup.

Alice runs slowly (but not as slowly as you describe) on machines with only 128 of RAM, so I suspect there is something additional going on that is making it even worse.

Memory is now cheap enough that it may be your best solution to just add more; that will make Alice, and a lot of other things, run much faster, on your machine if you can't pinpoint what else is going on.

I'm sorry that's not much of a silver bullet of a response.