Any known bugs here? ...
W10 with FireFox
Usually in the evening.
I'll look at both of my gmail accounts, but when signing out of the second, the laptop freezes with the disk light on.
There's no keyboard response in FireFox, not even to Alt-F4, and no mouse cursor.
There's no Internet activity indicated on the LEDs of the router.
The only recourse is to shut down by an extended pressing of the power button.
It's only been happening in the last week or so.
TIA
In message <s8orhu$l90$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me, gareth evans snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com writes
Try asking Jim, Gareth - he's an expert on matters digital.
Sorry, who is Jim?
When this happens, can you Alt/TAB to another application? Can you open Task Manager with Ctrl/Shift/ESC and then shut down FF, or is everything completely dead?
When you suspect that it's going to freeze, can you open Task Manager, display processes and sort on the CPU column to see whether something is hogging the processor?
me....you just have to accept like I have that digital doesn't work ....
I've had a similar thing with one or two specific websites in Pale Moon under Linux Mint. It was resolved by adding a couple of domains to "My filters" in uBlock origin. I think the explanation was a rogue script which had a sort of recursive call on memory. Once that memory had filled up the OS just choked.
Try disabling uBlock temporarily if you are running it, and see if that helps
No, can't launch Task Manager because of unresponsive mouse pad and keyboard.
Remove the 64-bit version of Firefox you are running and use the 32-bit one instead.
This bounds memory usage to <2GB on the 64-bit OS. That's because the 32-bit address space is split into 2GB user:2GB kernel space, and it cannot grab more than 2GB on you.
This is called "keeping greedy Firefox in a cage".
Recommended min memory on the laptop would be 3GB (which is by chance, what mine has, a 1GB stick, a 2GB stick). The idea is, if the machine had that much memory, Firefox might auger in, but leaving your OS still running. If the machine has the recommended minimum (1GB RAM installed), then it's not going to work well running either version.
Look in the Win32 folder here:
The profile folders should not care about the bitness. The Program Files (x86) will have a brand new, consistent set of materials for the job.
1) Programs and Features : Uninstall Firefox 64 bit 2) Double click your new Firefox Setup 88.0.1.exe and install.Since you're currently running 88.0.1, the 32 bit version will require no changes to the Profile folder.
There have been other notes about 21H1 problems on some machines. You can roll back 21H1, if you have not already deleted C:\Windows.old . 20H2 likely runs a bit better. One of the changes, is a change to a HyperV kind of setup (the Host OS is a guest). I have not seen a good article with modified-arch picture. There is an arch picture for Hyper-V, but I would appreciate seeing penciled in, the crap they're doing on the recently released setup.
Hypervisors makes debug almost impossible, for any kind of significant problem.
And no, I also don't have any info on the relationship of the Hyper-V settings in Programs and Features : Windows Features versus what the OS is using for itself.
Windows now uses a "container" to launch executables and this is organizationally claimed to be part of Windows Defender. Probably at this point, not everything runs in a container. Office 365 Excel or Word might.
There was a report of reduced framerate in games, implying a graphics issue caused by HyperV usage. A computer would be best-off, if it had SLAT/EPT support in hardware, and of all the relics I have here, only one computer is really "designed for Windows 10" at the moment :-/ Until someone can explain what the changes are doing, it's going to be pretty difficult to help people, one way or another. I don't particularly like suggesting going back an OS revision, but if that's what it takes...
Before 21H1 came in, on hearing some of the plan (the Container Era), I was concerned that older computers would just be turned away. But that didn't happen. They could only do that, by relaxing the SLAT/EPT requirement (which costs frame rate on graphics). And guess what, Firefox uses hardware compositing, and it recomputes that web page *60 times a second* using the GPU. There's a flogging going on there. Now, is that important ? Well, who really knows.
Your symptoms don't suggest any of my answers are right. What is it doing to the disk ? Process Monitor is the only tool we've got, and there is no assurance it can tell us anything about "items launched in containers".
Some people love the containers. You can see some horribly written articles by them on the web. I get the impression though, the stuff they use "just works" and they wake up every morning with the sun shining and so on.
Good luck, and if you see any change in symptoms, report back. Just so there are more reports of what helps or doesn't help.
Paul
So its only Firefox? Have you tried a reinstall or using the previous version?
Usually there are smoking guns in various log files when it occurs. It sounds like a memory leak if it crashes the whole machine. However a couple of years ago I had a weird problem like this with word, and in the end it turned out to be hardware. One ram stick was suspect and fitting another fixed it. Brian
I don't find Firefox an issue - but I do have plenty of RAM. 16GB on the machine I'm now using. Firefox uses less than 2 GB despite having about forty tabs open and, effectively, nothing else running and competing with it.
My personal experience is that 8GB has been a practical minimum for Windows 10 since it came out. Despite the claims to the contrary. Yes - I know you can run it on less but it is often not very happy. I was for a time running a 4GB Surface and changed to a very similar spec. with 8GB (after a replacement due to a hardware issue with the screen). The difference was even greater than I expected - and I knew to expect quite a jump.
I think there were issues in the last week or so - possibly due to some combination of Windows updates/Firefox/Office/something else. Seems fine now but for a couple of days had some odd issues. At least one Windows update appeared to have been re-released (assuming after it had been revised).
well if windows behaves anything like linux, that is a sign that uninterruptible disk activity is going on.
Now its fine for Winders of firefox to flush its caches as gmail closes any locally held files ...
...but that should complete unless its doing some sort of data reorganization - Thunderbird does 'folder compression' which can do this, but even that is interruptible
No, my fear is that what is actually happening is that winders is trying to read or write to a bad disk.
You need to invoke SMART tools to interrogate the disk and see if there are in fact too many errors
I thought of that but rejected it in this instance because of the permanently on disk light..
"Using native JavaScript, no, it is not generally possible to access a local file. Using plugins and extensions like ActiveX, Flash, or Java you can get around this rule, generally with some difficulty".
What that means is that its a really bad and nasty web app if it IS causing continuous disk access.
essentially a virus. BUT ... ...browsers use the disk a LOT as a cache and to store cookies and other stuff.
So my best guess is a bad disk
Yes JavaShit can cause browsers and computers to lock up, but not with the disk light on
Or disabling javascript...
1) Check hard disk for failure 2) Check you've updated Firefox 3) Use Chrome for gmail
I don't know for certain, but if ram was full wouldn't the script try to access more memory by using the swap file on the HD? That would lead to an "on" disk access led.
It only needs one of those nasties to lock up the OS.
Isn't that, to some extent, what uBlock does?
Look in the Event Viewer for any system event errors/warnings around the time of the hang.
I've been getting occasional hangs recently following a video driver update; is your laptop AMD Radeon - based graphics by any chance?
Yes its a process of elimination really. If its an ssd, my old 256 ssd started like this before one day it was gone completely and had to put in a new ssd and restore from a back up. Brian
Asuspro laptop Intel 1G8Hz, no info on the graphics chip, about 7 years old.
Gareth download a trial application for 'Process Lasso' and run it. It will identify any processor hogging applications that are running. You will have the opportunity to terminate the troublesome app.
In a quiescent state your computer should look like this:
That causes a McAfee web site caution!
Virustotal pretty much gives it a clean bill of health.
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