Digital Wild West

Aka, my computer is slow/busy/hung.

When Macromedia became Adobe I shuddered. I do the same when Symantec buys up wonderful smaller innovative products.

Adobe seem not to handle the Flash and Shockwave player updates for Internet Explorer (and FireFox, and Opera, etc.) any better, but not as badly as I feared. I can forgive them - the complexity and security issues will only grow more difficult.

The bottom line of this article is: when your PC gets slow; when the harddisk light (find the harddisk light and learn its behaviour; it’s telling you something important) is flashing madly and nothing seems to be happening on screen; when the screen is ‘frozen’ and bits of windows/screen are lying around not changing; when the Task Manager shows your PC is busy doing something, and though you know what it’s doing, it makes no sense for it to go on that long. And you’ve waited 5 minutes.

Time to reboot the computer.

If it doesn’t shut down gracefully (within 60 seconds) by the usual method (Start->Shutdown) etc., force it.

Hold the power button down/in for 10 seconds. (While that works 99% of the time, there are times when it might ignore you. Typically it might hibernating, for example. And anyhow, that would explain ‘busy’!)

This happened to my partner recently. Our PCs are in the same room and when she begins muttering I take notice. Her PC is an old PIII Dell Optiplex with 256MB RAM trying to run XP with all MS Updates plus virus checker, plus spyware checker. Well, in fact, it’s not up to it. Too much background work, no RAM (memory) left to actually do work.

That means, since her 256MB of memory is fully loaded with background software needed just to start and run the computer, the harddisk is forced to keep swapping chunks of programs out of it’s tiny 256MB space to the harddisk, and back again, as she clicks around doing things.

However, the other night the wheels fell off, as one says when a machine fails to operate as expected ..  as it so often does with under-resourced PCs.

Adobe Flash Player Update in progress

But I didn’t know that at first. The screen shot below didn’t appear until after a lot of cursing and the eventual reboot.

The harddisk had been rattling on for ever: 5, 10, 20 minutes.

The task manager said Webroot’s Spy Sweeper was gobbling the PC’s available power and memory. And though nothing was wrong with that, it went on far too long. SpySweeper is well-behaved. Something must be forcing it to chase its tale, so to speak.

So I "sat" on the power switch and 10 seconds later, down went the PC. Then I powered it up for a normal start.

Only after the usual startup programs had finished stuffing themselves into the PC’s meager RAM did the culprit emerge: the dreaded "Adobe Flash Player" update warning (screenshot above).

Why did that bog down the PC to a hopeless and unrecoverable state?

I can only guess that in a slower PC that also lacks memory, harddisk "thrashing" as it’s known (swapping from RAM to harddisk and back) reaches a state where it can never end. Process never complete. The PC eventually might lose the plot entirely, sort of forgetting what it started out to do.

This was one such occasion.

Tomorrow: Gritting one’s teeth for the Adobe Flash Player update. An odyssey of screenshots.

[PS: The fix, of course, is firstly to increase the memory available. Doubling 256MB to 512MB would effectively fix 90% of such occasions, assuming mundane programs like Word processing, spreadsheets, Internet browsing or email is all that's being done.

However, the gotcha is the cost of 'new' memory for older PCs like this (over 5yo) is around $200 - more than the PC is worth.]

Computer busy, Computer slow, Flash Player, Software updates

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