Help! Computer partial freezes - Lateral thinking needed
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From: Roger Mills on 21 Apr 2010 15:27 In an earlier contribution to this discussion, John Whitworth <sexyjw(a)g_EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE_mail.com> wrote: > "Roger Mills" <watt.tyler(a)googlemail.com> wrote in message > news:83847pFg95U1(a)mid.individual.net... >> In an earlier contribution to this discussion, John Rumm >> <see.my.signature(a)nowhere.null> wrote: >>> >>> 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). >>> >> >> 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. >> -- > Have you tried msconfig, to remove any programs that may be kicking > in at startup? > In effect, yes. > 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 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. -- Cheers, Roger _______ Please reply to Newsgroup. Whilst email address is valid, it is seldom checked.
From: John Rumm on 21 Apr 2010 17:30 Roger Mills wrote: > In an earlier contribution to this discussion, John Rumm > <see.my.signature(a)nowhere.null> wrote: >> Roger Mills wrote: >> >> >>> Anyone come across anything like this, or got any ideas? >> 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)? >> > 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) OK, different problem then... >> 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] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558584 >> > I get a similar problem with Firefox - which often used 90+ % of CPU time, 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. > but I don't think that's the cause of the freezes - which happen even if Nope I agree, yours sounds different. > 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!] 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. -- Cheers, John. /=================================================================\ | Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk | |-----------------------------------------------------------------| | John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk | \=================================================================/
From: John Rumm on 21 Apr 2010 17:35 larkim wrote: > On Apr 21, 11:53 am, "Roger Mills" <watt.ty...(a)googlemail.com> wrote: >> In an earlier contribution to this discussion, John Rumm<see.my.signat...(a)nowhere.null> wrote: >>> Roger Mills wrote: >>>> Anyone come across anything like this, or got any ideas? >>> 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)? >> 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) >> >>> 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]https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558584 >> I get a similar problem with Firefox - which often used 90+ % of CPU time, >> 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!] >> -- >> Cheers, >> Roger >> _______ >> Please reply to Newsgroup. Whilst email address is valid, it is seldom >> checked. > > 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. I would suggest before going that far - to try disabling the AVG add ons in the browser... > Alternatively, just uninstall AVG, reboot, download and install Avast > (or MS Securuity Essentials?) for free and see if the same problems > persist. 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. -- Cheers, John. /=================================================================\ | Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk | |-----------------------------------------------------------------| | John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk | \=================================================================/
From: Roger Mills on 21 Apr 2010 17:38 In an earlier contribution to this discussion, John Rumm <see.my.signature(a)nowhere.null> wrote: > > 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. > 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! -- Cheers, Roger _______ Please reply to Newsgroup. Whilst email address is valid, it is seldom checked.
From: Roger Mills on 21 Apr 2010 17:51
In an earlier contribution to this discussion, John Rumm <see.my.signature(a)nowhere.null> wrote: > larkim wrote: >> >> 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. > > I would suggest before going that far - to try disabling the AVG add > ons in the browser... > 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! -- Cheers, Roger _______ Please reply to Newsgroup. Whilst email address is valid, it is seldom checked. |