[greylove]

For the longest time I have been running into trouble sending messages to a friend on the West Coast of the US. I'm on the East Coast. I get scratchiness, slowdowns, just general chaos. It can last twenty minutes or longer, or just make no connection at all. Even just bringing up this member's page makes my computer go weird. I have to send PM's.....

I've recently started having trouble posting to another member who lives on the West Coast. When I start writing a message, the scrolling up and down gets all jerky, and the cursor completely disappears. I'll write a word and it won't show up while I'm writing it and then it suddenly shows up a few letters at a time. It is now taking a long time to post a message as well........

I don't know if this makes sense to anybody or if anybody can help. My frustration levels are reaching a new high......

[(JD)]

I don't know if this connected but I have experienced big delays in the game arcade... to the extent I can't play some games because of the intermittent delay in response from my mouse or keyboard to the desired activity in the game. I've changed to newer batteries too

I've run ad aware, and the McAfee is up to date and scans often, I disabled the real time scanning as that was causing one problem.... It's only been occurring recently since the computer updated with some windows programs....I deleted some of the updates and that seemed to help...but it was terrible last night (early this morning) but not as bad today.

I'm not having any issues on other sites.

[FooZe]

Originally Posted by greylove

I get scratchiness, slowdowns, just general chaos.

Can you describe more exactly what scratchiness looks like? Or is this it (from the second part of your post)?

When I start writing a message, the scrolling up and down gets all jerky, and the cursor completely disappears. I'll write a word and it won't show up while I'm writing it and then it suddenly shows up a few letters at a time. It is now taking a long time to post a message as well........

It looks as if you may have lost sight of your post and started over, only to have both attempts show up. Is that another part of the same problem you're describing?

So far this sounds like something on your computer, perhaps something running in the background (JavaScript? A virus?! ) tying up the processor and other resources. If it happens more with some pages/sites than others, that may be because some things on those pages (pictures? ads?) require more processing and cause more of a slowdown.

If it happened to me I'd want to try all of the following:

1. Shut down and restart the computer.
2. Scan the system for viruses and spyware.
3. Find a way to access the troublesome pages from a different computer and see if the problem still shows up.

One of my e-mail providers is a "portal" site that also offers links to news stories. When I open one of their stories, there's so much computer activity while it's loading that for a minute or so I can't even scroll down to start reading the actual story. I gather the site is setting up a lot of processor-intensive ads and stuff. The strategy I've worked out is to click on "Stop" as soon as the scrollbar shows that the page is long enough to contain the story, then scroll down and see what I got.

At one commercial site where I shop pretty regularly I often get a temporary freezeup followed by a notice (from my browser, I guess) about an "unresponsive script". I used to think that meant my system just couldn't handle those scripts but I'm finding that if I click to allow the script to continue awhile, it soon finishes whatever it was doing and I get normal access to the page again. I think those particular scripts may be for the purpose of letting me view enlarged pictures of the product and other "fancy" features that actually come in handy once in a while.

[greylove]

Hi FooZe,

Thanks for replying. The scratchiness I'm experiencing is literally noise. I know that I get that sometimes when I get "ahead" of the computer. It "scratches" until it's had chance to catch up. I get that with the first member, but there's no catching up to do. I can start fresh and still always get it.

Arrgghhh......this is so hard for me to describe. I do know (with my hubby's help) that I have tried steps 1 and 2. I'm going to try step 3 and see what happens. It will be interesting to find out.

If that gives me no clue, then I'll reprocess your message. I'll try sending again to these two people and carefully record what happens. Thanks for the observations and suggestions you have provided. I'll be back........thanks, grey

Originally Posted by FooZe

Can you describe more exactly what scratchiness looks like? Or is this it (from the second part of your post)?

It looks as if you may have lost sight of your post and started over, only to have both attempts show up. Is that another part of the same problem you're describing?

So far this sounds like something on your computer, perhaps something running in the background (JavaScript? A virus?! ) tying up the processor and other resources. If it happens more with some pages/sites than others, that may be because some things on those pages (pictures? ads?) require more processing and cause more of a slowdown.

If it happened to me I'd want to try all of the following:

1. Shut down and restart the computer.
2. Scan the system for viruses and spyware.
3. Find a way to access the troublesome pages from a different computer and see if the problem still shows up.

One of my e-mail providers is a "portal" site that also offers links to news stories. When I open one of their stories, there's so much computer activity while it's loading that for a minute or so I can't even scroll down to start reading the actual story. I gather the site is setting up a lot of processor-intensive ads and stuff. The strategy I've worked out is to click on "Stop" as soon as the scrollbar shows that the page is long enough to contain the story, then scroll down and see what I got.

At one commercial site where I shop pretty regularly I often get a temporary freezeup followed by a notice (from my browser, I guess) about an "unresponsive script". I used to think that meant my system just couldn't handle those scripts but I'm finding that if I click to allow the script to continue awhile, it soon finishes whatever it was doing and I get normal access to the page again. I think those particular scripts may be for the purpose of letting me view enlarged pictures of the product and other "fancy" features that actually come in handy once in a while.

[FooZe]

Originally Posted by greylove

The scratchiness I'm experiencing is literally noise. I know that I get that sometimes when I get "ahead" of the computer. It "scratches" until it's had chance to catch up.

Could the "scratching" sound be coming from the disk drive as it moves the heads around for reading and writing? A certain amount of that is normal but some problems can cause greatly increased disk drive activity or unusual sounds:

-- On my last computer, an older model with not really enough RAM, whenever I'd run low on memory the system would start frantically juggling RAM by swapping out chunks of data to the hard drive and reading them back in as they were needed. I could tell when this was happening because the drive would be chattering constantly and everything would take much longer than normal.

-- Sometimes when a drive is beginning to fail, the system detects reading or writing errors and retries the operation several times. In that case too, the drive would show increased activity, and reading and writing data would take longer. As I understand it, if the drive detects errors it automatically retries a certain number of times such as 10. If it can't get something satisfactorily read or written in that number of tries, it gives up and returns an error message (which Windows would almost certainly warn you of).

-- Sometimes when a disk drive has a mechanical problem and is on its way out, it actually sounds different just before it finally fails.

The computer I'm currently using is pretty much silent except for the cooling fans. It's also a "tower" and located a few feet from where I sit, so I hear it less than I did my old "desktop" right in front of me. The only way I can tell when the hard drive is doing something is by watching the little green light. The sound system does occasionally click, buzz or chatter in response to someone using a cell phone nearby or my downstairs neighbor turning on her ceiling fan. None of these sounds are associated with slowdowns, though.

[greylove]

Thank you again, FooZe. I'm sorry I didn't get back to you earlier. I've been doing a lot of catching up here and there. I appreciate the time you took to give me suggestions. I'm going to have hubby (the computer expert) take a look at them the first chance he gets. Thanks again......if I have success I will let you know.