Help! My Web Browsers Are Giving Up!

October 26, 2006 11:12 AM

My web browsers (FF 2.0 and IE 7 on XP SP2) have stopped working (kinda). I have to click on links over and over again to get the browsers to respond. When they do finally go to the page, they usually load half of it and give up. This started while I was still on FF 1.5 but seems to have gotten worse.

It takes a lot of going to Gmail to get it to "take." With my bookmarks, if I click on them directly nothing happens, but if i middle-click to open them in a new window sometimes it works, sometimes not. If I copy-paste the URL I want to go to and hit the "go" button 15 times really fast, it will go, but may only load half the page. This is happening on every "account" on my computer (I created another user account besides the admin account I always use on my PC and it had the same problem). It's happening in both IE and FF. I'd really like to avoid a total re-install of windows. Any ideas?

posted by adi to computers & internet (7 comments total)

It sounds like it might be the speed of your internet, not the browser. If it's a laptop, have you tried accessing the internet somewhere else? Just an idea.

Rather than re-installing Windows, have you reinstalled both browsers? IE is hard to actually uninstall, but Firefox is a breeze. Checked for spyware? Defragged the disk?

Good luck.
(ps: Firefox is abbreviated Fx)
posted by jesirose at 11:18 AM on October 26, 2006

They wish it was...
posted by Mr. Gunn at 11:50 AM on October 26, 2006

I agree with jesirose, it sounds like a bandwidth problem. Are you running a BitTorrent client? If so see this prior question.

If you are on WiFi, is anyone else (ab)using your connection? If not, are you sure you didn't accidentally get some sort of malware that is abusing your internet connection (to send spam or take down websites)?
posted by revgeorge at 12:05 PM on October 26, 2006

Forgot to mention that I'm on DSL (1.5 downstream). I checked for spyware and ad-aware got rid of a couple things -- nothing out of the ordinary, though. It's a desktop Pentium D 930 with 2GB of RAM that is only a few months old).
posted by adi at 12:06 PM on October 26, 2006

Is your mouse button OK?
posted by bonaldi at 12:15 PM on October 26, 2006

Have you tried another computer with the same modem/router?

Or you could try a Linux boot CD to see whether it's a software problem or something to do with your network.

Is it perhaps a DNS problem? Just in case, see if switching to OpenDNS helps (my ISP is incapable of running reliable DNS servers so I've had to find alternatives).
posted by malevolent at 12:16 PM on October 26, 2006

It was BitSpirit. It runs all the time and it didn't occur to me that this could be the problem because I have been using it for over two years now without this problem, so I don't see how this suddenly started -- but there we are. I'm upgrading my DSL connection to get more bandwidth and hoping that will help a bit. Thanks for all input.
posted by adi at 7:49 AM on October 27, 2006