The PC in question is a desktop and perhaps 7 years old. On Facebook - which seems to have lots of videos etc these days - it slows right down.
Is this likely to be a graphics card thing? Or anything else I could sort fairly easily? I've got a 24" monitor fed native via DVI.
My newer laptop doesn't show the same symptoms.
What browser ?
Chrome is as resource hungry as a resource-hungry thing ...
which OS ?. what type of graphics card ? (Integrated or PCI/PCIe ?).
Fragmented disk ?.
I have noticed a definite slowing of my 6-yo 6-core amd Win7 /32 machine and it seems to be the relentless increase in high-res graphics we are being bombarded with.
It used to be said that occasionally re-loading Windows as a fresh install cleared out the crud and improved speed by I thought Win7 had got over that.
It could be lack of graphics card hardware support for the video format that the websites use, meaning that the video rendering needs to be doen in software instead.
There is probably a temporary directory somewhere with 10 gazillion tiny and not so tiny abandoned "temporary" files in it dating back to the year dot. Try looking in for example:
C:\users\\AppData\Temp
And see what dross and rubble is residing there. Almost all of it can go. Do a backup before making any radical changes.
CCleaner and its ilk can help automagically remove unwanted dross but with the wrong options you can also delete all your cookies and saved passwords so be careful what you wish for and how you use it.
Only one I use is Firefox. Which as I said is OK on the laptop, but slow of the desktop.
I was sort of suspecting that. What card should I buy to speed things up?
Pardon my ignorance of Facebook, but I'm not sure why just because a site hosts lots of videos, provided you don't actually watch any of them, that that in itself should have any effect on the speed of the PC.
According to your description the problem seems to be with the Facebook site, and whatever resource hungry activity is taking place while you're connected to the site, rather than with your PC as such. Otherwise presumably you'd be experiencing the problem with other sites.
Does your version of Windows still support the task manager which will show how many resources are being taken up by each process ?
If you run the desktop and laptop in parallel and run the task manager on both that might give some idea of where the problem lies. That also assumes that the customisable settings, assuming there are such things are identical in both versions of Facebook.
michael adams
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Some of the video plug-ins for firefox can really slow down faceache and youtube. I had a lot of slow video problems with the plugin "Youtube High Definition" until I disabled it. Firefox Menu -> Tools -> Add-ons - Extensions.
While researching the slow Youtube video problem many of the web pages mentioned Youtube AND Facebook. Possibly one of the easier modifications is the first one mentioned in:
I can't recommend a card, but I think one of the most common modern video formats is H.264. I believe that H.265 (aka HEVC) is supposed to be the new kid on the block.
I suspect that a graphics card that includes hardware H.264 decoding would be a good starting point.
Before you buy anything... Is it only slow when you are using Facebook? If it is browser related you could try uninstalling the browser and theb reins talling. I would install chrome. Not sure whether Facebook still uses flash but in my experience flash cases all sorts of slow down.
I agree that flash is often a resource hog.
I've found quite a few sites will still use flash if you have it installed. But if you uninstall it, then most of the big sites will use HTML5 instead.
There's no flash on android or iphone (OK, you can probably install it manually, but I don't know anyone who does). So any site that wants to work on a mobile must support HTML5 or some other non-flash method.
First the obvious, do a scan with malwarebytes.org free malware scanner and have it make sure you don't have any browser "add ons" you don't need.
Check the amount of free ram in task manager - if you are running low on physical ram and it has to start paging then performance takes a nose dive.
If you are low on ram, go to live.sysinternals.com and run autoruns.exe and see if you can identify crap loaded at startup that you can do without.
If there is still too little, upgrade the ram if you can.
Check the free drive space on your system disk. Very low spare space will cause all manner of odd behaviours.
If none of those sort it, then we can look for other less likely things.
On a given Facebook page, does it stay slow forever, or does it speed up after a while? I see many sites that continue loading junk for maybe a whole minute, as witnessed in the Status bar, during which time things may be slow. I have a problem at the moment in that if I try to scroll Firefox before everything has finished loading, Firefox crashes.
Facebook -
They auto play...
Agreed, Facebook is a heavy user of javascript and resources. Following Mr Rumm's advice to check free memory/disk/resources etc would be a good starting point.
Yes - and I can't find a way of stopping that. I'd rather only play them if I want to.
It's when it is auto playing something that it slows down making it difficult to scroll past it. Once it's off the screen, speeds go back to normal.
That PC has more memory etc than the laptop. Plenty of disc space too. And regular scans from AVG Free and Spybot. That's why I wondered if it was the bigger display using up things and slowing it down. Must admit I haven't tries using a lower resolution.
Click in the address bar and type:
about:config
Hit return, and then click the button on the "here be dragons" warning screen.
Type autoplay into the search box.
That should find two configuration items. Change the value of "media.autoplay.enabled" one to false.
Exit config tab
Job done.
Select and all nuke. Anything actually open will throw up a warning where you can simply say "skip" on those.
Do the same in c:\windows\temp as well.
I'm surprised you haven't blamed it on the Tories.
Run chrome from a recent Linux live CD and see what your system is really capable of before spending money on upgrading the hardware.
If linux doesn't need the hardware spend, chances are windows doesn't either - and you have got a good old bloated windows resource problem to resolve.
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