Chet and I installed Instant Rails on our laptops. My laptop is faster
than his and has more memory. But his rails is working and mine is
infinitely slow. I'll dump what I know here in hopes that something in
it is helpful. Looking for ideas and things to try.

On his laptop doing things like
  ruby script/generate controller foo
will take maybe 20 seconds. on my laptop it takes four or five
MINUTES.

on my machine
  ruby -v 
comes back instantly.
 rails -v
takes about 25 seconds to come back. (I don't have that figure for
Chet's machine but I'm hoping that if your machine does it quickly
that may serve as a clue.

If I browse to rails_apps and say "rails demo" to create the demo
project, it takes 4 minutes to do anything, then spits out the creates
vert raoudkt.

When I CD to demo and say "ruby script/server" it hangs for eight (8)
minutes, then starts saying booting mongrel, rails app starting, ...,
starting mongrel listening at 0.0.0.0:3000, and starting rails with
development environment ...
(it has not as yet printed the time-stamped lines shown in the Agile
Web Development with Rails book. I'll wait some more ...

It has been fifteen minutes and it hasn't said anything beyond the
starting rails message. I'll try the browser.

Firefoxhas been waiting for localhost for 20 minutes. Either its very
slow or it is hanging somewhere. Ruby is getting about 30 or 40
percent of the CPU. Both cores are running at about that percentage.
Explorer, winlogon, and Instant Rails are all getting a bit of CPU
from time to time.

Ideas? I could sure use one. Thanks!

Ron Jeffries
www.XProgramming.com