OT Browser issues

[Tim Lamb]

Both Opera and Palemoon were said to work on XP SP3....

I suppose there could be a fault which is not causing a problem with the other software I use.

Actually Norton *is sorry to have encountered a problem and must shut down* is a regular event now.

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[The Natural Philosopher]

Go to world of Computers in Cambridge and say 'fix this as cheap as possible'

Generally works for me.

[Tim Lamb]

Yes. Something more local at Hemel Hempstead.

Actually I have a second hand Windows 7 pro 32 bit taking up space on my desk. Everything works but I made a c*ck of transferring Turnpike and reverted to using the old m/c rather than inflict more pain on my aged brain.

[polygonum]

You have, of course, run a full scan with your anti-virus AND run a full scan with Malwarebytes? (The "of course" and the question mark do clash. :-) )

[Johnny B Good]

Well, the Sempron didn't get blessed with an SSE2 instruction set until May 2006 so your old PC must be at least 10 years old to have missed out on this feature. Unfortunately you've not given enough info to be able to speculate any further.

AMD made many versions of the Sempron processor from Socket A onwards. It was a more upmarket replacement to the budget Duron CPU which, afaics, never reappeared in the later socket formats (Sockets, 754, 939, AM2, AM3, FM2 and FM3), its place having been taken by the Sempron budget versions of the Athlons and Athlon 64s endowed with a plethora of names such as the "Phenom II" and so on.

If you can identify the motherboard model and find out which socket type it is (I'm guessing "Socket A") or run a utility like CPUID to identify and characterise the CPU, you'll know with certainty as to why your browsers are complaining about the lack of SSE2 support.

Incidently, Socket A (aka Socket 462) was replaced by Socket 754 during

2003 and by Socket 939 during 2004. If, as I suspect, your PC is a Socket A (Socket 462) type, that makes it at least 12 years old. Another way to date it is to enter the cmos setup next time you boot it up and look for the bios version and date. In this case the date could precede the manufacture or sale of the machine by a year or two but at least it will indicate the vintage of the technology employed by that Asrock motherboard.

If the Motherboard is the later Socket 939 (2004 models), you might be able to upgrade the processor to a single core Athlon which will provide the SSE2 feature required of your browsers. Having said that, I rather suspect it'll be easier to buy a more recent secondhand PC no older than

6 years or so than to track down and fit a Socket 939 Athlon.

[Tim Lamb]

Nothing found with a full Norton scan although there have been several

*closures* when running in the background. Not tried Malwarebytes recently.

I'm a fairly unadventurous browser and avoid opening the more obvious mail lures so would be puzzled by finding anything nasty.

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[michael adams]

Just noticed this.

And yup, its definitely him

User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.5.1

So much for one of the NG's "computer experts"

michael adams

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