Digital Wild West

Aka, gritting one’s teeth and negotiating a dozen ‘dialogues’ to the bitter end.

I always insist your primary mission is to know and understand your computer, to feed it, nurture it, protect it, … to UPDATE it!

Problem: Deciding if you should update Adobe Flash Player in response to an unsolicited dialogue, usually after either restarting your PC or opening an Internet Browser.

Mission: To simply follow the dialogue (small nagging windows) till the software is "updated" and not get distracted OR bluffed by nefarious choices.

Steps: Additional to simply following prompts, you would likely restart your PC twice and test each time by starting your web browser.

Conclusion: Adobe Flash Player is worth updating as it is integral to properly viewing most visual content on web pages, not only adverts. It is key software. But go the full distance: visit the Adobe player test page and also install/update the Shockwave player too.

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Despite the unbelievable hoops and gotchas that companies like SUN (Java), Microsoft (Vista, XP, MS Office, Internet Explorer) and Adobe (Acrobat Reader & Writer, Photoshop, Flash & Shockwave) make you perform and dash yourself on the rocks of, you simply have NO CHOICE but to keep your computer UP TO DATE with software patches and updates IF you are going to use your PC on the Internet.

Like all software, even the simplest components can be hijacked by the bad guys and used to attack your PC. By ‘attack’ I mean do anything they please, from stealing information to totaly destroying your data and making it into a PC-shaped door stop.

When companies like Adobe discover their lovely Flash player has a bug that allows crooks turn it into the player from hell, they have little choice but to issue a "patch" or fixed version for download and install.

If Adobe tell you to update the Flash player — just do it.

And here is a typical sequence of misery you will need to wrestle.

1. The warning.

While a bogus message is possible, it’s so unlikely that we shall proceed on trust.

A bogus notification is unlikely if it appears after rebooting.

2. Clicking "Install Now" displays the Adobe Flash Player Update progress bar. You are, by the way, still proceeding on trust. You normally must in these situations (trust that it’s really Microsoft, or Adobe) but stay observant.

3. Adobe Flash Player Update "completed successfully" dialogue.

I know, boring, isn’t it. At this stage you might return to your work. But how do you know it’s working? Do you care?

You WILL care in a few days - or tomorrow - or a month’s time - when the "Update Now" message reappears. Or a nag screen pops up at the most wrongest of moments "Restart now to complete installation of Adobe Flash Player" - by which time (days late) you’re experiencing déjà vu, having probably forgotten the update.

Finish here, or continue?

It won’t hurt to continue. You will find the Flash Player test page and not only confirm most definitely the player works, you will also discover the Shockwave Player and find that it probably does not!

What is Shockwave? It’s a multimedia player that preceded Flash. Both players can exist as web browser plugins to simplify, or ‘ubiquitise’ installations. Shockwave authoring tools offer more powerful toolsets, so it won’t be going away in the foreseeable.

 

4. Search for the Adobe Flash and Shockwave players test page:

 

 

5. Make sure you select the real deal ("adobe.com") from the SERP (Search Engine Results Page. Notice the SiteAdvisor green check icon to the right. It’s kosher!):

6. Clicking the link in the Google results from above sends you to the Adobe Flash player test page at http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/ where you can see below (partial screen shot) the failed player test just behind the dialogue. This dialogue "Internet Explorer - Security Warning" confirms the real-deal Adobe Systems "shockwave Player" is about to be updated.  The web page detected your browser was not up to date and initiated automatically the update sequence.

Now, isn’t that odd? Wasn’t this all about "Flash Player"?? Well, just accept that Shockwave and Flash are Adobe twins. Where one goes, the other goes. You rarely see the "Shockwave" update nags, but they’re just as handy. You see, we chose the "Shockwave" update link, even though Adobe called it the "Test .. Shockwave AND Flash .."   Whatever.

7. Then this happens (yawn):

8. Then this. I’m losing the plot, btw. I think it’s still doing the Shockwave thingy:

Select a language and OK you way to oblivion. 

9. Oh, look. How cunning. Just when you were screaming in agony and writhing in excruciating boredom (You just want to get your work done. Right?) Adobe try a swifty in a deal with Symantec and try to trick you into the bloody very last thing you need right now — A FRIKKIN’ NORTON SECURITY SCAN!

Make sure to UNCHECK the little tick before clicking ‘Next’:

10. In my case - and I’m sure yours will be something equally exotic - the next thing that appears is an apparently failed install - probably sulking about the Norton knockback and hoping I’ll be silly enough to start again:

 

11. Ta Da! I reloaded the page (click "refresh") and both players report success.

It’s never obvious till the end, but success means you see both Flash and Shockwave display a so-called animation. Nothing moves after they load, so to be sure, float your mouse cursor over the two player sections and some snazzy animated menus appear.

 

12. Sigh! I’m sorry I started this article.

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.]