You might want to try Brave Browser as an alternative to Firefox. All the speed of Chromium platform but none of the tracking that Chrome uses, plus blocking of ads is built in. It's been a revelation on our slow work 'broadband' as browsing is so much quicker when all the referrer servers don't get queried as the page loads.
Sync folder is based in Canada if you are running a criminal masterminds back-up. Encrypted and 'mostly' out of reach of the TLA agencies in USA.
Difficult to work inside a PC without touching the case! It has to be plugged in though if you want to earth yourself.
What version of Firefox are you on TJ? Is it up to date? You could try uninstalling and reinstalling just Firefox. That would be easy and quick and zero risk.
I think firefox is up to date. I'll check. I am trying running it in safe mode as above.
It has to be plugged in though if you want to earth yourself.
The key thing is that you don't have an electrical potential between yourself and the PC. It doesn't have to be plugged in to do that just by touching the case. Basically, just get in the habit of touching the case every time you go to touch any electrical component inside and you should be fine.
The Brave browser sandwich suggested seems to speed stuff up as well.
You guys are great. thanks. Looks like you might have saved an old computer from going to landfill and saved me a few bob
thanks
On static:
The best way to earth yourself is to leave the PC plugged in but switch it off at the mains socket. The earth then remains connected but the power is isolated.
That said. I believe the risk of static shock to modern components is vastly overrated. I'd possibly still be wary around CPUs but you could rub a DIMM against a cat wearing a nylon jumper and you'd probably be OK.
Can't hurt to follow good practice though, of course.
On memory:
RAM is there to be used. The notion that Windows using lots of RAM is a problem is bogus - or rather, it doesn't inherently mean that there's a problem. A modern Windows OS (and Linux I believe) will start grabbing available memory to use for file caching and other performance boosts; whilst this RAM is technically "in use" the OS knows it can dump it if something more important comes along.
Of course, if it is actually RAM-starved then you're going to have a bad day. What's relevant here isn't necessarily what taskman / perfmon says about RAM utilisation but rather whether it's suddenly smashing the hard disk for no discernible reason.
The constant smashing of the hard disk can be caused by 'paging' or 'swapping' which is writing memory to disk when it hasn't got enough RAM. There's probably a way of interpreting the stats to see when this is happening, but I prefer to open resource monitor and go to the disk tab. There you can see the files being written to. If the one with all the activity is pagefile.sys then that's your answer.
Ta again. I think I understand that. 😉
seems to be fine now tho
