Friday, July 3, 2009

Browse this

Does Firefox run away on you? Happens to me all the time, and it's very frustrating. CPU spikes up to 99%, mouse clicks take 30 seconds to take effect, the fan runs high to disperse the smoke coming off the processor. Meanwhile, my laptop is unusable.

The culprit? Not Windows (except for its architectural - and false - assumption that processes are well-behaved).

CNN.com is the problem, usually in reaction to any of the Windows sleep modes that come after inactivity. Kill the tab that CNN occupies, and everything goes back to normal. You can even bring CNN back up.

Getting to the bottom of why, I leave to someone who knows more than I do.

3 comments:

Silence DoGood said...

I have not heard of the CNN site having issues like this. But for general malware/bad-cookies, which look like what you describe sometimes, I would recommend the free (individual) Lavasoft Adaware scan.

Also when it is slow use Cntrl-Shift-ESC and sort the processes running by CPU % to see if any bad-ware is using to much time.

globeisatrocious said...

good lord, get a mac! I thought all liberals had macs.

lovable liberal said...

Nah, gia, if we all had Macs, Apple would have much better market penetration.

SDG, yes, I sort by CPU in Task Manager, which is how I know Firefox is hogging the processor.

Malware scans come up negative.