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#1
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Slow system
My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if
it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? TIA -- I love a good meal! That's why I don't cook. |
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#2
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Slow system
KenK wrote:
My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? TIA Look at Task Manager, to see if Windows Update is railed. Use a copy of HDTune, and benchmark the hard drive. I had a drive here, that "slipped into PIO mode". I eventually ended up changing the port it connects to, to stop that behavior. In PIO mode, the disk will only do about 4MB/sec or so. Yes, you can "Reset" Firefox if you want. But I wouldn't jump to conclusions just yet. Paul |
#3
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Slow system
KenK wrote:
My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? TIA In addition to what Paul has said, you could always make an image backup of your system and then uninstall Firefox to see if that was the problem. If not, simply restore the image (this is assuming you don't want to simply uninstall and reinstall Firefox to test out you suspicions). Also, if it is Firefox as you seem to suspect, you might consider using an older version. I generally find the older versions of most software better because they are less bloated and resource heavy. For example, I've stayed with Firefox version 36, partly due to the aforementioned reasons, and partly due to the add-on compatibility issues which get more problematic with each version update. |
#4
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Slow system
KenK wrote:
My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? TIA How does it run with FF turned off? This is the FF group: mozilla.support.firefox |
#5
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Slow system
In message , Paul in Houston TX
writes: KenK wrote: My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? TIA How does it run with FF turned off? This is the FF group: mozilla.support.firefox But you have to register with the Mozilla newsserver (free); you won't find it on the usual servers. -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf .... "Peter and out." ... "Kevin and out." (Link episode) |
#6
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Slow system
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Paul in Houston TX writes: KenK wrote: My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? TIA How does it run with FF turned off? This is the FF group: mozilla.support.firefox But you have to register with the Mozilla newsserver (free); you won't find it on the usual servers. Yes. I forgot to add that. |
#7
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Slow system
"KenK" wrote in message
... My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Before adjusting software, it would be wise to verify free space on the C:/ drive. Most users find C:/ needs 10 per cent free space for maximum speed. -- Don Phillipson Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada) |
#8
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Slow system
On 20 Mar 2017 17:51:10 GMT, KenK wrote:
My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? CTRL-ALT-DEL and look at processes. See what's using your CPU and RAM. Look at startups, remove any Glugle, Java, Adobe etc updaters/dataminers. It could be just a corrupt driver. Try reinstalling, specially video. Have you defragged the HD recently ? How's your swapfile ? Work on the above, and give us some feedback. []'s -- Don't be evil - Google 2004 We have a new policy - Google 2012 |
#9
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Slow system
Paul wrote in news
KenK wrote: My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? TIA Look at Task Manager, to see if Windows Update is railed. Sorry, 'railed' is not in my vocabulary. If you mean using a very large number of cycles, that's System Idle Process, which seems normal. Around 70. Avp.exe is usually also active. But I've not been on much yet today and the system may not be running slow today. Use a copy of HDTune, I'll look for this later. I don't have a copy that I'm aware of. and benchmark the hard drive. I had a drive here, that "slipped into PIO mode". Will HDTune tell me that? I eventually ended up changing the port it connects to, to stop that behavior. In PIO mode, the disk will only do about 4MB/sec or so. Yes, you can "Reset" Firefox if you want. But I wouldn't jump to conclusions just yet. Paul -- I love a good meal! That's why I don't cook. |
#10
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Slow system
Paul in Houston TX wrote in
news KenK wrote: My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? TIA How does it run with FF turned off? Can't get MS IE to work. I'd need another browser, but don't know which to choose. I suppose I could DL a new version of IE, but would rather not use IE. This is the FF group: mozilla.support.firefox -- I love a good meal! That's why I don't cook. |
#11
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Slow system
"Don Phillipson" wrote in
news "KenK" wrote in message ... My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Before adjusting software, it would be wise to verify free space on the C:/ drive. About 33 percent free. Most users find C:/ needs 10 per cent free space for maximum speed. -- I love a good meal! That's why I don't cook. |
#12
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Slow system
Shadow wrote in
: On 20 Mar 2017 17:51:10 GMT, KenK wrote: My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? CTRL-ALT-DEL and look at processes. See what's using your CPU and RAM. I thought that restarted the computer? Look at startups, remove any Glugle, Java, Adobe etc updaters/dataminers. It could be just a corrupt driver. Try reinstalling, specially video. Have you defragged the HD recently ? How's your swapfile ? Work on the above, and give us some feedback. []'s -- I love a good meal! That's why I don't cook. |
#13
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Slow system
KenK wrote:
Paul wrote in news KenK wrote: My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? TIA Look at Task Manager, to see if Windows Update is railed. Sorry, 'railed' is not in my vocabulary. If you mean using a very large number of cycles, that's System Idle Process, which seems normal. Around 70. Avp.exe is usually also active. But I've not been on much yet today and the system may not be running slow today. Use a copy of HDTune, I'll look for this later. I don't have a copy that I'm aware of. and benchmark the hard drive. I had a drive here, that "slipped into PIO mode". Will HDTune tell me that? I eventually ended up changing the port it connects to, to stop that behavior. In PIO mode, the disk will only do about 4MB/sec or so. Yes, you can "Reset" Firefox if you want. But I wouldn't jump to conclusions just yet. Paul HDTune is easier to use than using Device Manager, and checking the tab in the Properties of each IDE entry. At least, I find it easier, because I frequently cannot figure out which drive is which. http://www.hdtune.com/files/hdtune_255.exe The HDTune graph for a hard drive, should be a gently declining curve. Starting at 100MB/sec on the left, and stopping at 50MB/sec on the right. Some modern drives can do twice those numbers. Whereas, if a cable is forced to PIO mode, the processor moves each byte manually (i.e. no DMA). The transfer rate in HDTUne drops all the way down to a flat line at 4MB/sec. You cannot miss this in a benchmark run. Just a few seconds of benchmark drawn on the screen, and you can spot it. ******* In Task Manager, System Idle keeps track of all the CPU that isn't getting used. Whereas other named items (SVCHost containing Windows Update in this case), may register as a percentage corresponding to the number of cores on the CPU. If you have a 4C 4T CPU, Windows Update is using one core all for itself (as SVCHOST), you would see "SVCHOST 25%" in Task Manager. Because your whole four core CPU would be 100%, and a single core all used up is 25%. The OS kernel scheduler is allowed to migrate tasks from one core to another, many times a second. The scheduler considers the "cost" of moving a process. Moving a process between cores requires some cache coherency traffic, and that is considered a "cost of doing business". More modern OSes will keep the task running on a certain core for longer, to avoid excessive migration costs. So the graphs don't stand still. The wiggling moves from one graph to another. But the percentage used, of a railed SVCHOST, should remain constant at (1/n_cores)*100%. If you have a 4C 8T processor, that's a four core processor with Hyperthreading. You can have eight threads of execution. If SVCHOST rails on one of those, it's (1/8)*100% = 12.5% CPU. So railing a single virtual core in that case, is 12.5%. Railing a core, means the runaway task uses all the clock cycles. If you had a 3GHz processor, you use Process Explorer, and drilled into the task in question, you would see Naughty_Thread Cycles = 3,000,000,000 Sleepy_Thread Cycles = 0 Dopey_Thread Cycles = 0 indicating that the Naughty one is using everything that one core has to offer. The process isn't all that aware it is moving from silo to silo while this is happening. For example, to suck up all the cycles, you could write code like this. 1: Do_something GoTo 1 And a tight loop like that might use all 3,000,000,000 cycles available in that one second interval. System_Idle is the left over residue. It is defined as a low priority task. If no other task is eligible to run (not "ready to run"), then System_Idle runs. System_Idle doesn't actually waste cycles. It does a sleep(), and the next clock tick "wakes things up". So on the one hand, System_Idle captures the left-overs for accounting purposes, yet, doesn't use any electricity. By entering sleep() for a time slice, the ACPI power state can drop if it wants to. Note that it is possible to "hijack" System Idle. I had a subscription to Kaspersky AV do this. Kaspersky installs its own System Idle task. How could I tell ? I held my hand near the power supply one day, and it occurred to me "you know, it never used to be this hot". And I discovered the *******s had installed their own System Idle task. The purpose of doing this, is to prevent malware from doing it first. So occasionally, the accounting system is screwed up by "monkey business". In retaliation, I kept using Kaspersky, but "stole back" System Idle by using yet another System Idle task provided by RMClock. And then the power supply cooled off again. Paul |
#14
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Slow system
KenK wrote:
Paul in Houston TX wrote in news KenK wrote: My XP Home has been running very slowly for about a week now. Not sure if it's Firefox (52.0.1) (likely) or XP. Firefox has a speed up offering but I've never tried it. Supposed to clear out unneeded stuff. Little reluctant to let it mess with my system but I guess I have little choice. Suggestions? Maybe I need to go elsewhere (where?) for Firefox support? TIA How does it run with FF turned off? Can't get MS IE to work. I'd need another browser, but don't know which to choose. I suppose I could DL a new version of IE, but would rather not use IE. This is the FF group: mozilla.support.firefox There is Seamonkey Suite. http://www.seamonkey-project.org I'm using 2.40 at the moment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeaMonkey ******* There is a Chromium-based browser called SRWare Iron. http://www.srware.net/en/software_sr...n_download.php It needs its own special flavor of Flash. http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/otherversions/ Select Operating system = 7/Vista/XP Version = PPAPI [a.k.a Pepperflash for Chromium] Note: in the middle pane, disable the "free offer" The nice thing about that browser - I don't use it for everything, but I use it for "difficult" video sites. If you visit http://www.youtube.com/html5, all the boxes for capability there will be green. And Flash also works in it. ******* I used browsers in this order: IE - never Firefox - old version, not much tracking capability. No video works. Seamonkey - For sites with Flash, some Flash now no longer works, even though Flash is up to date. SRWareIron - Reserved for video playback situations, where the others failed to deliver the video. ******* To scan the "prefs.js" on each of your Mozilla browsers, you can use Adwcleaner. It searches for adware or toolbars. It has a "scan" option and a "clean" option. You can use "Scan" for a look around. http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/adwcleaner/ Consider whether some add-on is broken on Firefox. Watch your Task Manager for evidence. Web pages with looping Javascript language scripts, they can cause the browser to appear to freeze. If you're lucky, the browser uses a timer to detect the browser interface is not responding, and will put up a dialog indicating "a script is looping" or similar. Sometimes this can be fixed, by "moving down one entry" in the list of above browsers. Some scripts loop, because the tracking feature they seek to abuse, is not on your browser. So to beat some sense into you, they freeze the browser. ******* Both Firefox, some modern versions of Internet Explorer, and Adobe Flash, use GPU hardware acceleration. Sometimes browser instability is caused by this feature. Disabling hardware acceleration, can provide relief for people with really old video cards (that's me). Or people who don't have the right video driver installed, or maybe the manufacturer stopped making driver update a hundred years ago. Sometimes, that one manifests as graphical glitches, but if forced to do emulation, the software render path can chew up a lot of CPU. HTH, Paul |
#15
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Slow system
In message , Paul
writes: KenK wrote: [] Sorry, 'railed' is not in my vocabulary. If you mean using a very large number of cycles, that's System Idle Process, which seems normal. Around 70. Avp.exe is usually also active. But I've not been on much yet today and the system may not be running slow today. [] Railing a core, means the runaway task uses all the clock cycles. [] I think the expression comes from analogue electronics, where a sufficiently large signal at the input of an amplifier causes the output signal to hit the maximum, usually close to the "power rails". (Otherwise known as "clipping"; if the signal is seen on an oscilloscope, the reason is clear.) -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf A good pun is its own reword. |
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