Help! Computer partial freezes - Lateral thinking needed

[Adrian]

Huge gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

I've got the Science Museum on the phone, want a word with you about a donation.

[Huge]

I started down this road because AVG rendered the machine unusable. So did MS's own AV software. Last weekend I installed Avira and Malwarebytes and they seem to work just fine.

[Huge]

I already gave my *real* old computer collection to the Computer Museum at Bletchley Park.

Besides, it's "only" my wife's machine. So long as it does email and webby stuff, she's happy.

[John Whitworth]

The OP had the 7-8 year old machine - wasn't inciting yours was unfit for the job, but now you've mentioned 'celery' ... ;-)

AVG was dreadful when the daily scan was running. I just don't bother with it. It was still painful with multi-core. So in essence, I agree - but I just switch off that bit.

[The Natural Philosopher]

yep. Old laptops LURVE Linux!

[John Whitworth]

Given the fairly good timing that the problem is keeping, I'm not so sure it is that. Though it can't hurt to vacuum it out. Don't think you'll get much through the air intakes though. Just open the case up, and then very carefully hoover around with the crevice tool.

[Adrian]

Huge gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

[Adrian]

"John Whitworth" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Indeed. Age isn't a huge factor there.

I was at my old man's for the weekend. As ever, "Would you mind having a quick look at my computer..." was heard.

God, it was slow. Painful. Gruesome.

2.4 Celery, 512Mb.

Yup, that'll be why.

[John Whitworth]

Why would a PSU cause some most of Windows to freeze, but Mailwasher to keep going, at around 10.00am each morning?

If it were a video card issue, everything would have probably stopped on the screen. But it seems to be application specific.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Or any other distro actually.

A friend got a VERY old laptop for his daughter, for university. Mail, web, and word processing.

On went IIRC SUSE linux and open office.

She used it for 3 years, and when it died 'Can I have linux on the next one dad?'

Its the perfect platform for someone who

- has someone who knows how to install it

- doesn't give a toss about computers: Just wants to USE one.

[The Natural Philosopher]

problem on 12v which drives USB stuff, and things like keyboarrds.. but not on main CPU and clock.

Not so. hot stuff goes off timing wise before it goes off completely. That gives corrupt access to anything on the bus at all. Especially whose address is somewhat like the cards I/O address.

I had a card once that did that any ANY temperature. Crap design.

It was a video capture card. Its only visible effect was to corrupt just two bytes of a file being copied from the floppy drive to the hard disk.

It reacted to just a certain address, followed by an I/O operation and grabbed the bus. What you got in a DMA transfer off a disk in fact, but only when writing to certain memory locations.

Took me three days to pin it down.

[Huge]

She's getting Ubuntu and liking it. We have enough OS's in this house already.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ubuntu's slightly too bleeding edge for stability for a user who doesn't enjoy fiddling with computers.

Debian stable is about right for older hardware.

[John Whitworth]

But that's not what is being described, is it? His taskbar freezes.

But an application specific freeze (or rather everything freezing apart from the mouse and one application that continues operating normally) isn't "going off timing wise".

So this card has got nothing to do with "hot stuff going off timing wise"? ;-)

Sounds like hardware contention over a small area of memory. From the description the OP gives, though, it sounds totally irrelevant.

Basically, all any of us can do is guess. And squabble. I end my offerings on this particular thread here! ;-)

[NT]

Quite, there are too many possibles. One useful tip is that software problems are many times more common than hardware, so start with software. Its easy enough to stop apps starting up at boot time, and that cures many issues, but not all.

However, the best bet really is to stick a Linux Ubuntu or Mint CD in, and if you like it, install it alongside windows. Really, save yourself so much time.

NT

[Dave Liquorice]

Avast! Just does it's thing quietly (apart from telling you "Virus datbase has been updated") and effciently. Free for non-commercial use. I moved to Avast after AVG Free decided that downloading every page linked from a search result page just to display a little green "safe" icon was a good idea. Doubling my net traffic in two weeks was not so welcome...

[Bruce]

Isn't that site just the *best possible advert* for a Mac, or Linux?

[Bruce]

I used to use AVG and had frequent slowdowns even when AVG appeared not to be active. Since removing AVG from the system there has been a very significant improvement in performance.

I don't know whether AVG is at the root of your specific problem, but as an anti-virus package I think it is best avoided, along with Norton and McAfee.

[Roger Mills]

In an earlier contribution to this discussion, John Whitworth

No, I hadn't and there wasn't a Printers entry in the drop-down list. I've now done so, and it shows the printer which is physically connected, but not the Canon all-in-one.

Yes, I could probably do that. The driver shows up in the program list, but doesn't show a task name so I've no idea whether it's loaded or not. The only obvious canon program was MyPrinter (some sort of printer monitoring program) which I have now disabled - and we'll see if that makes any difference.

If necessary, I'll uninstall the driver - but not just yet.

[Bruce]

My experience also. In Avast! you can disable the sounds, so all you get is a pop-up telling you the virus database has been updated.