Borked Internet Explorer

[Mark]

It's worth persevering with, just to be free of all the M$ problems in this thread.

Three killer apps in Firefox for relaxed browsing Ad-Block Flashblock and Download helper

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[Spamlet]

Last time I installed Firefox and Chrome they did indeed both have memory leaks and needed restarting regularly. The save/restore session was invaluable there.

Does anyone know whether either of them "call home"? The reason I ask is that shortly afterward installing Chrome my daily bandwidth consumption went from 10-20Mb to well over 100, rapidly exhausting my monthly quota. I never managed to track down the culprit (could have been something else) and in the end I had to disconnect from my ISP when not surfing, which was a bit of a pain. The computer on which this happened died, and my new one (with only IE8) is now back to

10-20Mb. But I don't have the courage to retry them.

Chris

Firefox does check for updates, and also so do any add ons you may have on it: add blocker updates come pretty thick and fast but better with than without. Actually I find Firefox is mostly slow at shutting down rather than starting up.

Haven't allowed Chrome in. I don't like the way other programmes tend to keep offering it and expecting one to tick boxes not to download it. If it is anything like Google Toolbar it will have umpteen parts that try to contact google every time you start up, and which keep coming back no matter how many times one deletes them or blocks them from the start up sequence, so I'm not trying it.

The other thing that has been slowing computers down lately has been Microsoft Update. They may have fixed it now, but if you can remove MU and find the Windows Update site proper and tick the boxes to revert to WU ( right at the bottom of the page), you may find, yourself saving a lot of unnecessary traffic on start up (WU, seems to hardly use any resources on my laptop, whereas MU took the whole processor for several minutes after start up, and seemed to have a lot more updates to install, that I presumably didn't really need!)

Cheers, S

[Spamlet]

No: I've not yet turned up any viruses, with Tea Timer, Avast and Malware Bytes help (finger's crossed) nearest I came to getting one was from a site pretending quite convincingly to be a prompt from MS Security Centre upon which I pulled the plug, before updating my hosts file. Though I'm still a bit vague as to what server it might be on, as I thought the only one I would have been using would be the one in my router.

Only minor hassle I have at the moment is that after I had to install Nero's InCD, to be able to format/erase some types of disc after I fitted a new DVD/RW to this old laptop. I notice in Process Explorer that I/O bytes for INCDsrv.exe climb up steadily until, oddly, they drop right down if I 'verify' the prog in it's properties sheet. I asked a question about this in the System Internals forum, but got no replies. It does not seem to affect the cpu so it is only a minor irritation. Anyhow, we are getting a bit OT. All interesting though.

Cheers, S

[Tony Bryer]

I had that problem a couple of months back. I have Carbonite online backup installed which backups changed files. I didn't realise when I installed a TV card that each programme I recorded was then grabbed for backing up and my monthly quota was gone in a few days. Fix was to set the 'don't back this up' flag on the recordings folder. ISP wanted to nail me with a $300 (£200) surcharge - the small print says that if you go over your quota they charge you

15c/MB for the next two GB then drop you to dial-up speed. Fortunately I was able to get them to cancel this.

[Spamlet]

That is where Process Explorer comes in handy. You can often find whole strings of IEs open that you are not even aware of - especially when they have been opened - or failed to - from within websites instead of deliberately by oneself.

Event viewer will also help you see if any particular module is consistently causing the failure.

S

[Andy Burns]

I wouldn't expect this to cause problems on a home install, but on corporate networks where it needs to go through a proxy server, I've seen the Google updater searching, failing and retrying dozens of times per second for updates ... that could add up ...

[Mark]

Chrome is notorious for "phoning home". I believe you can stop it but I won't use it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Google, the new Microsoft...