My CPU fan is whizzing its little nuts off here. I know it's old ground but for heavens sake:

STW in Chrome, with ads on:
80% CPU to run the flash ads, 6% to run the browser

STW in Chrome, with ads off:
0% CPU to run the flash ads, 3% to run the browser

STW in Firefox, with ads on:
66% to run the browser (incl Flash)

STW in Firefox, with ads off (and I can scroll again without the Cotic banner):
0% to run the browser

This is not funny and nor am I trying to sh1tstir about adblocking, but its a real drag on other apps and it's making my computer work far harder than it needs to, makes the browsing experience crap and not to mention that Cotic banner borks my scrolling when I browse in Firefox with the ad in place. With all that, what do you think the solution Im forced to use is? Do STW towers not care about this at all?

but STW *prides* itself on a ropey website yes?

How do you turn off the ads?

Can it be done with NoScript?

I know the ads are a source of revenue, but it's getting beyond a joke when they are hogging so much of the system resources. Fine line – satisfy your advertisers and alienate your customers?

Grrrr…

Without wanting to sound too much like a Charlie Brooker hate character, it seems to run fine on a mac under both Firefox and Safari. Maybe STW towers is all OS X?
That cotic backdrop is a bit richard whiteley tie though.

How do you turn off the ads?

cant tell you. It's in the rools.

geoff – what mac do you have and is is set up with shedloads of ram for photoshopping etc?

I have 2Gb in a 5 year old machine. It shouldnt matter. A website shouldnt be ripping its tits off like STW does.

Aye but the rules don't prohibit you from sending me an email…

😀

It's pissing me off so much that I'll never buy a bike from a manufacturer whose name begins with C.

Currently on a MacBook 2.4 ghz with 4 gb of ram, but I usually use a Samsung NC10 with 2 gig and its fine on that – I'm not on Snow Leopard yet though.

nope, no issues here. Vista and running firefox. CPU runs at max 30% to drive firefox, but bounces between 10-30%. Core2duo/2.2GHz, 2Gb RAM… nothing super special.

Are you running AVG by any chance?

yes

Ive just disabled it, and still 80% of CPU time is being used to run these damn flash ads.

killing the environment also with the extra power required.

Tsk tsk!

bloody hell how long has that cotic banner been there?
lol 😆

My CPU is barely registering this site…

what OS are you running nick?

I get the same results as Stoner.

XP Pro SP3
Firefox 3.5.3

argh. so narked off with this now. Im off to bed.

I really want to run chrome as my default browser but because it doesn't have an effective adblocker yet and I have STW open all the time I cant use it – I have to stick with FF.

Its a pretty poor show when your choice of browser is mainly driven by the behaviour of one website.

I remain convinced the behaviour of the ads on this site is counterproductive.

Im on Vista, a pentium 4 2.8ghz CPU, nothing special in the graphics card stakes and 2Gb of RAM.

Back in the day you could run a space station on one of these. Now I cant even run a forum of middle-aged witterings. That's progress I suppose….

Well on my macbook pro the flashplayer and safari combined total of the cpu is between 30-60% for this site. Quite ridiculous.

Not now

Not on this PC, but on both my others – one which is a quad core and one which is a PIII. The PIII is ground to a halt with it. I assume it depends on software versions?

No problems here on a 2Ghz T6400, so nothing flashy. CPU under 10%.

Vista SP2, Firefox, Avast.

I'm OK Jack! I have 4 cores with water cooling and I've never been able to load it hard enough to make the fans speed up, even at 100% usage :o)

Sorry, somewhere else, Firefox, XP, Boggo spec Dell, nothing spectacular

There's a number of sites that at times are almost impossible to navigate without some assistance – this one and the Telegraph are the most significant IMO.

I personally have taken to mainly watching the main forum RSS feed instead of browsing the normal topic list page since the Cotic background appeared. 🙁

Is there any chance that SingleTrack could perhaps have a higher priced mag subscription which allowed the purchaser to tick a box in their userprefs and remove the ads?

since the Cotic background appeared.

I mentally tuned that out in about 10 seconds. I quite like the shaded grey 🙂

Absolutely kills my old laptop. All the fans come on max and the whole thing runs like a dog.
completely unusable with the ads on.

Fine on my main desktop PC and work PC (even when I allow the ads and don't re-jig the layout)
Though it does seem to randomly crash firefox on both PCs. 🙄

Also fine on my iPhone.

simonfbarnes – Member
I mentally tuned that out in about 10 seconds. I quite like the shaded grey

No it's not that I don't like it, it looks fine – I actually quite like it.

It's that type of static CSS background which stays still when the rest of the content scrolls – it makes scrolling the page really jerky

Yeah that was discussed earlier in the Cotic thread. No real idea why something staying still would make the scrolling jerky. Fine on my PCs but a few people have reported it and TomDB was investigating.

My PC runs fine. But then I have two Cotic's so it probably knows to be kind to me 😆

Background image shouldn't add any drain to the CPU once loaded.

Flash? Well Adobe have made lots of really bad performing plug-ins for all sorts of browsers. If you've got one of their bad ones then a couple of flash ads can work your machine real hard. Recent versions of Firefox paired with older versions of flash can be a real pain.

Nah it's bad on my laptop even with latest firefox and latest version of flash.

No idea why the static cotic background is causing some folk issues, but it apparently is. I did suggest that having a fixed background overlayed over a scrolling one might be the issue, but not so according to Tom so all very odd.

Actually if you google "fixed background jerky scrolling" you get 3,500 hits so it may be a common problem.

Vista 64, 3.0GHz Core 2 Quad, 12GB DDR3, Quad 150GB Raptors, IE8.

8% CPU with all the adds turned on.

on an old ibook G4 with 1GB Ram, firefox uses 7% with just googlemail open, if i open another tab with stw, shoots up to about 80% 😯

shut stw down and went to the NSMB forum, CPU usage dropped to around 20%

ps i'll never even consider a charge purely because of those adverts!

Vista 64, 3.0GHz Core 2 Quad, 12GB DDR3, Quad 150GB Raptors, IE8.

8% CPU with all the adds turned on.

I should hope so too!
You could start WWIII with that setup!

Still crap this morning then.