The Nice People Thread, No.16: A Universe of Niceness.

CKhalvashi

PasturesNew wrote: »

It's a battery/rechargeable one (Lidl), that comes in a plastic case with some bits... so everything has a place. And when you buy it, it's in a cardboard sheath in the shop, so I keep that too... everything's put away immediately after being used, because it has its place. What it doesn't have is: an actual spot in the house to be stored consistently as I have a lack of storage/furniture to meet that sort of need at the moment.

Electric....that is a huge posh alert.

I've got a multi-ended screwdriver set (in fairness in a box) that cost about £10 from somewhere and can be changed over in a few seconds, working on magnets.

It's too small to have a problem storing it (although it's I believe currently in the corner of the kitchen where everything I don't have a place for goes) and extremely useful for just about anything. A very good piece of kit!

chris_m

PasturesNew wrote: »

My PC isn't always super slow, but there are some websites that simply take forever to load. Off the top of my head http://www.cornwalllive.com is one. I never go there now.

I can see why - the front page is basically an array of variously sized images which the browser doesn't know how to lay out until it's got them all. Diabilocal design IMO.

Also, using Facebook and Twitter really chew up the cache until the PC grinds to a halt.

Wouldn't know about them

Chrome is also out of date/not updated on XP Home - and there are now also issues with loading anything that uses Flash. Additionally, sites like the DM have auto-start videos - and those take forever until I can stop/close the video that pings out.

This could be worth considering installing;
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/flashcontrol/mfidmkgnfgnkihnjeklbekckimkipmoe?hl=en

I have a similar thing in my Seamonkey browser - it replaces any Flash content with a placeholder on which I can click if I really want to see the video or whatever it might be. Of course, not only does it not play the Flash file, it doesn't even download it unless I ask.

Then.... and I've tried to turn these things off.... the PC automatically tries to do a load of updates and that makes the PC halt until I can get control of it through Task Manager to try to shut those processes down. e.g. in particular wuaudt.exe - and, while booting up, GoogleUpdate.exe (4-5 instances of that occur).

There should be the option to set updates to only be when you want rather than automatic - unless that option was disabled in XP Home. I haven't tried that version. It'll be in Windows Update if it is available.

Then, randomly, when I realise the PC isn't responding and I look at Task Manager, I see wuaudt.exe running - and one instance of svhost.exe is running at about 200,000kb and taking 99% of processing time. At this point, the ONLY thing to do is reboot because if I shut down that single svhost.exe then I'll lose connectivity/the Internet in 5-10 minutes, so I might as well reboot immediately.

That's a pain - I regularly close the svchost process on my W7 PC if it's decided to eat all my RAM when I actually want to do something. I don;t mind it running when I'm asleep but not when I'm actually using the PC.
However, stopping my svchost process doesn't kill my connection or do anything other than give me the memory back. That could, of course, be because it's W7 not XP.

PasturesNew

I just timed/tested, from chrome, opening up this thread, takes 30 seconds.

I sit and read things like "processing request" and all the other paraphernalia that appears in the bottom status line while waiting sometimes ... or wander off, having launched a page I want... knowing it'll be there when I get back and I won't have forgotten where I was going

silvercar

PasturesNew wrote: »

I just timed/tested, from chrome, opening up this thread, takes 30 seconds.

I sit and read things like "processing request" and all the other paraphernalia that appears in the bottom status line while waiting sometimes ... or wander off, having launched a page I want... knowing it'll be there when I get back and I won't have forgotten where I was going

Microsoft Edge is meant to be faster than chrome; not that I've swapped over.

chris_m

PasturesNew wrote: »

I did that about 5-6 weeks ago and it seemed to improve things ... but after a week or two I noticed it was creating MORE GoogleUpdate.exe instances.

Now when I reboot and log on I have to immediately go to Task Manager and sit there killing GoogleUpdate.exe instances and wuaudt.exe until I see that Avira has loaded in the systray.

I know nothing about Avira and little about Chrome, but I'd guess that GoogleUpdate.exe is something to do with Chrome.

I think I'd be tempted to try and locate the file GoogleUpdate.exe and try to rename it to see if that stops it running. If there aren't any updates being made available for it on XP, thee can;t be much for it to do anyway.

chris_m

silvercar wrote: »

Microsoft Edge is meant to be faster than chrome; not that I've swapped over.

Will it run on an XP Home machine with 2Mb RAM?

PasturesNew

It's tricky to change browsers after many years ... as one's added bookmarks and the odd password that are saved to the browser.

While I've got all passwords written down.... it's all a faff to keep discovering another one that used to automatically log on or offer the username etc ... and have to connect the USB stick where I store them all and log into the password store programme I have there and look it up.

silvercar

chris_m wrote: »

Will it run on an XP Home machine with 2Mb RAM?

Not a clue. All I know is that it appeared when I upgraded XP to Windows 10.

chris_m

silvercar wrote: »

Not a clue. All I know is that it appeared when I upgraded XP to Windows 10.

That's because it comes with Windows 10, doesn't mean that it'd run on the OS from which you migrated - which it won't.

GDB2222

PasturesNew wrote: »

I did that about 5-6 weeks ago and it seemed to improve things ... but after a week or two I noticed it was creating MORE GoogleUpdate.exe instances.

Now when I reboot and log on I have to immediately go to Task Manager and sit there killing GoogleUpdate.exe instances and wuaudt.exe until I see that Avira has loaded in the systray.

I actually believe that, maybe, Avira is in part a major part of the problem ... no evidence, I just have a feeling about it, that something it does/checks causes all this stuff to kick off. I'd bin it if I could find a better (slimmer) solution than Avira.

I've even tried removing Avira and doing a fresh install, in case a backlog of updates was giving issues, I thought maybe a fresh install would give me only the latest version, which might help. That seemed to make no difference.

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/which-free-antivirus-is-the-lightest-on-system-memory-usage/

As the link says, they’ve checked which AV uses least memory. Avast free AV is the one that uses the least.

PN, have you tried simply leaving the PC alone for a very long time, in the hope that it gets all these updates done?