Help! Computer partial freezes - Lateral thinking needed

[John Rumm]

You can turn that on or off as you choose, or not even install that module if you prefer.

[John Rumm]

Yes, recently...

Something to try when it next "freezes"....

Does ALT + Tab escape from the freeze? And what about CTRL+ALT+DEL (i.e. opening task manager)?

If so it sounds like a problem I had with Firefox after an update from

3.6. It was getting resource hungry - swallowing 50% CPU for no apparent reason, and on occasion - would seem to cause a freeze like you describe

- especially when trying to resize or move a window.

After a few days of irritation the problem went away! The only significant event I can correlate with it was a message recently on starting FF warning that the Java Deployment Toolkit had been disabled for security or stability reasons. Since then it s been fine. Looking at the specific reasons for the block list entry of that[1] it does not seem to be related to the problem I was having - so may be co-incidence.

[1]

[John Rumm]

Check there are no services that have been installed and set to autostart as well. (Right click My Computer and select "Manage", then drill down to the services list).

[Dave Liquorice]

page

When they first bought that feature in you had to jump through hoops to switch it off then put up with warnings that "your computer is not fully protected" or some such bullshit. Life is to short to have the tail waggging the dog, so it got dumped. AVG was also slowing the machine down, (dual core 2.8GHz 4GB RAM, so not an underpowered machine).

Avast! isn't noticeable and just works.

[Bruce]

My experience also.

I changed to Chromium - identical in all respects to Google Chrome but it doesn't report your browsing habits to Google.

[Roger Mills]

ALT+Tab cycles round the open applications, but none of them - except Mailwasher - will do anything, or even close down - they just go into Not Responding mode.

If task manager is already running when the freeze happens, it carries on - showing chan ging amounts of CPU time used by each task. If it *isn't* already running, Ctrl+Alt+Del doesn't start it (and no other applications will start, either)

but I don't think that's the cause of the freezes - which happen even if Firefox isn't running. [I recently updated to v 3.6.3 (after the freezes started happening) in the hope that it reduce the amount of CPU time used - but it hasn't!]

[Roger Mills]

Thanks. I've got the list open at the moment, but don't really know what I'm looking for. I can't see any that are *obviously* associated with the Canon printer.

[larkim]

I don't think enough people have suggested removing AVG as a potential option. I used to be an AVG fan, but I've had problems on my PC, my fathers and my father-in-law's PCs and all of them were resolved the minute I cleaned off AVG.

For a test period (providing you are careful) you could just uninstall AVG and run without an AV scanner - see if that makes a difference.

Alternatively, just uninstall AVG, reboot, download and install Avast (or MS Securuity Essentials?) for free and see if the same problems persist.

AV would certainly by my first thought.

Matt

[John Whitworth]

Have you tried msconfig, to remove any programs that may be kicking in at startup?

Start - Run - msconfig. Then select the Startup tab, and uncheck anything that looks suspicious. Hell - untick everything, see if the problem goes away. If it does, selectively re-introduce things.

JW

[Roger Mills]

In effect, yes.

I have a third-party Startup program in Control Panel which does the same thing - and I've disabled anything which look suspicious in that.

[John Rumm]

OK, different problem then...

Have you got a single core processor? Thinking about it - I was seeing

100% loading of one core - so that would amount to pretty much full occupancy of one core.

Nope I agree, yours sounds different.

I am not sure what fixed it for me - tried various things which made no difference, but then it worked again - that seemed to co-inside with that plug-in blocking but I can see no reason why it should have had that effect. I have seen the same effect (and cure) on three of my systems as well.

[John Rumm]

I would suggest before going that far - to try disabling the AVG add ons in the browser...

Avast would be preferable to the MS one - its currently outperforming AVG anyway in tests[1] apart from on false positives where it is a bit worse.

[1] Current performance of an AV product is not always a good reason for change since they all have good and bad phases and take a little "learning" to work out which aspects of performance they hit most.

[Roger Mills]

Yes - the computer in question is 7 or 8 years old - I'm not sure that multi-core systems had been invented at the time!

[Roger Mills]

I hesitate to say this . . . but, since making a couple of changes yesterday, the system has run ok all day today without freezing at all. The two changes were:

• Disabling an auto-starting Canon printer-monitoring program called MyPrinter (relating to a printer which is not physically present, 'cos it's at my 'other' property

• Running the Fix-it thing which someone mentioned, and allowing it to disable a couple of video codecs which it thought might cause problems

Time will tell whether this action has really fixed the problem, or whether this is just a temporary respite!

[Huge]

Well, not in consumer level equipment, anyway.

[Mark]

I have tried Avira, AVG and Microsoft Security Essentials recently. I've stuck with MSE because I could not disable the annoying Avira advertising pop-ups (which are like malware!).

[Huge]

Interesting comment, because I've never seen those.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember tony sayer saying something like:

Avira - free, stable, fast.

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember Mark saying something like:

It happens once per update. Small price to pay for free protection. My updates run at 1am, so barely gets noticed.

[Graeme]

In message , Grimly Curmudgeon writes

Following this thread, I uninstalled AVG Free, and installed Avast, which seems to work perfectly, although I had to disable the mail scan feature, to allow e-mail to work.

Now we have another recommendation. Any thoughts on Avast v Avira?