Quoting Tony B <ton...@gmail.com>:
Ultra ATA <> SATA. I'm telling you, you'll be making a big mistake to
rely on anything except your own eyes. In most laptops, it's only a 5
minute procedure to open it up and look at it - probably less time
than you've taken so far playing with software. And you're going to
have to do it eventually anyway to replace it.
That may be, but hey, look how long this thread has actually been
about <gasp>computers</gasp>. (-:
Visually inspected, it is, in fact, an Hitachi SATA drive.
So anyway. . .
I seem to have picked up a strange problem on this Toshiba Satellite
(A105-S2712) concerning Firefox. I'm dual booting the original WinXP
and Win7. In both systems Firefox (or something related to it) seems
to be slowing my computer down.
When running XP, as soon as I start Firefox the computer slows down to
1/5 of normal speed. How do I know it's 1/5? Because the clock ticks
one time every five seconds. Consistently. It doesn't pause for a bit
then catch up, it just runs at 1/5 speed. The only way to recover from
it is to shut down.
In Windows 7, I can start Firefox and run it until I get to certain
pages that seem to have some kind of video in them (playing or not).
An example includes <http://www.aopa.org/summit/live.cfm>. The YouTube
home page will do it also, though not quite 1/5 speed (more like 1/3).
When I leave the offending page, the system goes back to normal speed
(although, several seconds behind). I can even leave Firefox running.
It's not just the clock that slows. It's everything. Cursor blinks,
window resizing, the spinning Avast ball in the "Notification Area",
the Firefox throbber. Oddly enough, the offending video will play at
normal speed. Go figure.
CPU reports normal activity. Running currently at 35%, with Firefox
using 15%. Memory is about 685MB used, out of 2GB. With a non-running
video in one tab, web mail in another tab, and another window open to
compose this email.
Shut down, restart, go into BIOS (before it can reach out to set the
time from the Internet), and the clock is at the current time. So I
don't think it's a hardware issue.
How did I get into this mess? Dunno. Near as I can tell, "it just
started happening". I updated the BIOS per Toshiba for the Win7 install.
Everything should be up to date. I've got Zone Alarm free and AVG free
running on XP. Been that way forever. I've got Avast and Windows
firewall and Defender running on Win7.
In XP, I uninstalled Firefox, ran Crap Cleaner, and deleted everything
I could find pertaining to Firefox (backed up my bookmarks and deleted
all profiles). Reinstalled Firefox. Made no difference.
So, I figure a wipe and reinstall should do *something* for me. And
while I'm at it, I might as well upgrade the drive, on the *extremely*
outside chance that I picked up a root kit that anti virus is not
likely to find.
That's my sad story, and I'm sticking to it.
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