Monday, August 27, 2007

Definitely Time For That New Computer

If you can't read it, that's Penny Arcade trying to play an embedded video. It's not going well. The red underlined section is Task Manager, showing that Firefox was using 89% of the processor's resources.
I'm no expert, but I don't think it's supposed to take 90% of processing power to surf the web. Another clue might be that I can type entire lines and even paragraphs into blogger's post window and then walk into the kitchen for a soda--and not all of the stuff I just typed has appeared yet when I get back. Thank whoever for Notepad!

9 comments:

Sevesteen said...

I'm willing to bet a clean reinstall of Windows will make a huge difference. On the other hand, that's as big a pain as getting a new computer, just not as expensive.

...or an install of Ubuntu Linux...If there's enough space on your hard drive, don't even need to get rid of Windows.

BobG said...

The computer isn't the culprit; you have software problems.

Laughingdog said...

Not knowing what kind of processor and how much memory you actually have, it's hard to say if that's the actual problem. But I would like to point out that Firefox has become notorious for being a processor and memory hog if you let it. It wasn't always that way, but there have been widespread reports of this in the last year or so.

When I played World of Warcraft (I'm a reformed junkie), I was able to track nearly every crash I had to Firefox slowly sucking up more resources. I have since learned to make sure to restart Firefox about once a day if I want to avoid actual computer restarts.

Don said...

Hmmm. I guess I'll go google around a little.

I really wanted that computer, too.

Don said...

I searched around a bit and the only "trick" I found was to turn down the number of days FF remembers visited pages---but I already had that set at 9 days. Didn't find anything else weird in the settings, either.

I noticed a minute ago that "System Idle Process" was taking in the 70-90% range of CPU cycles, too, and that was after I closed every process I could that wasn't critical. Does that sound like a Windows XP problem?

Feanaro said...

I noticed a minute ago that "System Idle Process" was taking in the 70-90% range of CPU cycles, too

The System Idle Process doesn't take up processing power. It simply measures how much your processor isn't doing.

Don said...

So . . . . at those times, the CPU was actually showing idle 70-90% of the time?
Hm.

freddyboomboom said...

I vote for a software reinstall, also.

If you don't play games, or have Windows Only software (not including Office) that you NEED to have, I'd say go for Ubuntu Linux.

You can even get them to send you a CD that you can boot off of to test drive it, without it doing anything to your Windows install.

Then if you like it, you can install off that same disc.

Clicky clicky

Or, if you don't want to get a disc from them, I'll send you one... freddyboomboom is the address at Gmail...

Unknown said...

"The computer isn't the culprit; you have software problems."

Yeah, Firefox. I've gone from an avid supporter to a Firefox hater. Every version is bigger and more bloated. Firefox has become Netscape. The best solution would be to downgrade to version 1.x, if that's possible.