Late in the installation process for Microsoft Windows Vista, the system displays the following message:
Please wait while Windows checks your computer's performance.
It then proceeds to display, at a leisurely clip, a series of Vista’s exciting new features while, presumably, Windows is doing something useful. At the same time, the person (me) wanting to use the computer is prevented from doing anything useful with it.
While observing this, it occurred to me that the word “check” has more than one definition. I think this is the one Microsoft intended:
check: stop or slow down the progress of
Then it all made perfect sense!