logical.order.of.chaos

So, I’ve been having all sorts of problems with windows and Internet Explorer lately. 

Vista would freeze when I was in the middle of anything intensive.  XP IE7 was freezing whenever I tried to type something into the address bar.  It would intermittently freeze when I was switching between windows.  Someone had me look at their PC and whenever he was using a particular component it would close his IE browser window when he moved his mouse.

 These issues have been plaguing me for a while.  What gives?  Ok, addmittedly, I installed some of them testing things out.  But some of them like Skype add-on, I didn’t want.  I wasn’t even aware that when I installed Skype it was adding this component to IE7.  IE7 has add-ons.  It seems they pretty much add these add-ons whenever you go to a site, or install a program on your computer.  I finally decided to go in and disable all add-ons to see if that was the culprit.  This fixed both the IE7 on mouse moves problem, and my address bar and intermittent freezes.  Right now, I only have Flash installed, because you really can’t get away without that on the web.  IE7 runs as smoothly as the day I installed it.  Whatever that means.  But it did clear up my issues, and it runs great now.

 Disable IE7 Add-Ons:

Open IE7
Tools->Manage Add-Ons->Enable or Disable Add-Ons

Make sure you have Add-ons currently loaded in Internet Explorer selected

Then start disabling each of them individually.  You can turn them on as you find you need them for the work you do.  Otherwise, you should probably run as little as necessary to get your job done.  I find this is what causes most computer problems.  Too much junk running that you don’t need.  I guess Multi-Tasking has its downsides too.

As for the Vista freezing issue.  This one was much more annoying to me.  I was trying to work on video editing, and every time I would move the position the whole computer would freeze up.  Everything.  Then it would get jerky for a bit, then freeze up.  Sometimes I had to reboot using the power button.   Not a good way to run your computer.   Finally, what I did was break the problem down.  I ran msconfig and turned off all of the garbage running in the startup.  There is a lot of junk that gets loaded onto your system as you go.  Same as the Add-Ons, there is a lot you probably don’t even want.  After doing this, I found that nVidia drivers were the culprit.  They were causing this whole issue for me.  I turned those off, and anything else I didn’t want, and my Vista was running happy as it was intended to be.

 Shut off startup programs:

Start->Command  (or Start->run-> cmd (ok))
msconfig

Go to the startup tab, and disable everything.  You can boot your machine nice and clean without this garbage in there.  But, make sure you take the time to look through to ensure that you don’t need any of it at boot time. 

In conclusion, I’m getting a bit tired of all the cleanup activities I need to do in order to run my computer.  Your computer should do what you want, when you want.  It should not be running tasks that you don’t need.  It is a difficult question as to what should and shouldn’t be running.  However, I think every company that makes a program thinks they are important enough to run in the background.  I’d rather have a few seconds longer to start up, than have 100 quickstarts running.  But that’s just me. 

Filed under: Maintenance, Web, Computing