Firefox 3.16.2 +XP

[Elaine ..Spain]

Is anyone else having problems with FF?

On my older laptop (running XP) Firefox is running incredily slow, often not loading pages and the only way to get things working again is to close down FF and reload. Whereas before I could open a number of tabs at once, letting them each open in their own time, now I can only open one tab at a time, and if I try to open a second before the first has fully loaded then everything just hangs! It's driving me mad!

My other laptop which runs Vista seems to be working fine.

I really don't know if it is FF or my computer. :(

[lorry53]

It's fine for me, Elaine. Do you have any add-ons, themes or extensions on your XP laptop that you don't have on the Vista one? If you have, you could try disabling them to see if it makes a difference.

[Elaine ..Spain]

I can say for sure that I don't have anything other than the basic FF.
I have been so frustrated with the computer over the last week or two that I did a reformat last night and so far have only re-installed FF, Chrome, AVG, Adobe Reader/Flash Player - hoping it would cure whatever is wrong .... but it hasn't!

[Elaine ..Spain]

I am wondering if there is some underlying problem with the laptop.
Having just struggled to get back into FTF I had to hit Ctrl/Alt/Delete to close things down.

I then checked the Administrador de Tareas (can't think of the English translation!!!) which showed quite a bit of CPU activity when there was absolutely nothing open and I wasn't pressing any keys!

Is this normal? If not any idea what could be wrong.

[lorry53]

Whoa! That does look odd. It's Windows Task Manager, btw. Have you checked the Procesos tab to see what's running?

[Elaine ..Spain]

Task Manager - yes I remember now!

Procesos - all a bit double dutch to me! Main things seem to be Firefox.exe, AVGIDSAgent.ext, System and svchost.exe

Actually, should clarify what I said earlier. It wasn't actually a reformat I did - but a return to factory settings.

[lorry53]

If you click on the CPU heading on the Procesos tab, it will sort what's running by CPU usage. I would expect System Idle Process to have the highest figure, but is there anything else that has a high number shown? Firefox and svchost will have the highest memory usage.

[Elaine ..Spain]

It´s fluctuating between the System Idle process and AVGIDSAgent.exe

[lorry53]

You might want to check this forum thread. Do you have AVG 2011?

[Elaine ..Spain]

I do have AVG 2011 but only since last night when I installed it after the clearing the hard drive. I've had this problem for a few weeks now so not sure if I can blame AVG 2011 for it. (Previously had an earlier version of AVG)

Looking at the CPU tab, AVGIDSAgent.exe activity ranges from about 40% to 99% which somehow doesn't seem right!

[lorry53]

It certainly doesn't, so reinstalling might help, even if it doesn't solve the problem completely. It might be worth contacting Mozilla to see if they can throw any light on it.

[Elaine ..Spain]

I´ve just disabled AVG and sat here opening as many windows as I want without any problems- so maybe it is an AVG problem rather than FF.

I might uninstall AVG and try another virus progam - any suggestions on what to use?

[lorry53]

Looks like you've found the problem. I've always used Norton Internet Security, but of course, it isn't free. I've heard Avast is good, but I can't vouch for that.

There are some reviews here.

[Elaine ..Spain]

Thanks for your help. I'll sort something out tomorrow and let you know how it goes!

[lorry53]

Good luck!

[col48]

Looks like you've caught the culprit.

This kind of slowdown is most likely to be
(a) anti-virus software doing a full disk scan in the background - perhaps the most likely?
All such software would probably ask to do a full scan when first installed and it can take a long time. Periodic full scans, too. A faulty setup could mean it doesn't register the fact that it has completed the scan, so starts again next time you boot up. You have AVG, but it could be any antivirus.
(b) nearly running out of CPU/memory - this means that every process spends its time negotiating with the other processes for the memory it needs rather than getting on with the job. This can happen with disk space, too, if the process does a lot of reading/writing to disk, when the disk is fairly full.
(c) disk defrag - but you'd know this was happening because you would have initiated it.
(d) a virus - this is the bogeyman, because people who write viruses do not want them to advertise their presence prematurely; slowing down a target computer would be such an advertisement, I think; so this one can be discounted unless there is other evidence.
(e) some program you had installed which runs in the background and is absorbing excessive resource (memory, CPU time). Again, you'd probably recognise a process name, since you had asked for it. There would be something in autostart to set it going on boot-up.

It doesn't necessarily come on gradually.

[MarionH]

Timely thread - I've been having problems recently and it seems to be when AVG is running. I spoke to a computer friend at the weekend who is extremely particular on anti virus programmes and has tested them out (he explained to me the way he did this - took a lot of time to do it) and he has come to the opinion that something called Vipre has come out on top. I have had a look at it and it seems interesting and is quite reasonable so I shall be installing that on one of my machines tomorrow!
Marion

[Inahaystack]

I had problems too. I have been running AVG Free in Firefox for 3years on my XP with very few problems until a couple of months ago while running AVG 2010. I disabled the Link Scanner and all worked well until I updated to AVG 2011. Then everything wound down to a snails pace - URGH!! . A friend did a registry scan for me and found that there were 859 junk files clogging up the system - time to get the zapper out! After a registry clean, and adjusting cache and cookie clearing settings etc;etc; all is working really well.

[MarionH]

Have installed Vipre and all is running very smoothly. Also downloaded (after advice from same computer friend) something called Pareto Logic OC Health Advisor - so far so good - this computer has been so slow I can read a book while some of the things are booting up!
Marion