Had my Acer netbook for about 18 months now.

All's been fine when it comes to surfing the net, etc... up untill about a month ago. Basically any webpages take anything from minutes to, literally, hours to load! What's going on; why would it suddenly do this?!

It's driving me nuts - the frustration is immense lol.

Any IT bods/technophiles know of any of possible causes for this?

 

What are your internet connection speeds? Try;

www.speedtest.net

 

My browser of choice is Opera... but it doesn't seem to make any difference when using Chrome, IE or Firefox, either!

 

They seem to be fine - well, at least based on my torrent files upload/download speeds.

But I'll do another speedtest when I get in (if I can!), and let you know...

 

Thing is, it was also happening at another location i.e. using someone else's ISP's BB connection too (not just my own ISP/phone line!!!)

Go figure!

 

Have you scanned for viruses, trojans etc..?

Have you installed any toolbar or plugins for browsers?

 

Yep, I regularly scan and remove viruses/malware/spyware, etc., using rkill + Malwarebytes (did so on Sunday, as it happens - hard drive currently minty fresh).

Plus I have Avira and AVG installed as my antivirus firewall.

No erroneous toolbars/plugins AFAIK (as they take up too much screen area and I hate 'em lol).

 

Open up your task manager and check what processes are taking up all your resources.

 

Good idea - I'll do it when I get in and take a screengrab and post up...

 

Thanks CREWJ. Your idea of checking Processes in Task Manager has made me realise what could be the problem.

I've ended some tasks which I think could be the culprits, and hey ho, everything seems to be back to normal...

God knows why I didn't think of it before!

 

LOL!

Actually, I think I may have sucked my own dick a bit too early.

It's loading pages, but now still too slowly - albeit it IS loading them. I'm getting really fed up now..........

 

What were the processes that were slowing you down?

 

Sounds to me like you have something running on there that shouldn't be shall we say. Could be anything from a keylogger to a bug in a genuine piece of software.

If it was mine I would employ a 'scorched earth' polciy and reinstall it from the ground up - only way to be sure there isn't something nasty left on there as there could well be despite all the anti virus/malware software that claims to deal with all this.

 

you could go "start" "run" then type "msconfig.exe",
in the start up tab go thru and see what is starting up when you switch your laptop on,
as mentioned you could have anything using resources.

 

F1 has a good point. You can't have much info on a netbook, reinstall windows and that should clear it up.

 

Thanks guys.

I'll post up a screengrab of the Task manager first - just in case there's something obvious that you guys can pick up on...

 

I use spybot, its free and works a treat. Also, some other virus checkers will help, use some of the online ones (bitdefender being the best i think anyway).

Usually with browsers, it tends to be a piece of spyware, spybot will root it out for you.

 

also being a netbook it may not have a cd drive so a format gets a little more complicated for the novice.

 

Quite often though they can be reformatted without even touching a CD as the install kit is on the HDD and the companies often provide a nice easy application to reinstall it form the setup menu. In fact generally these days they are easier than reformatting a desktop.

 

Ha, funnily enough I was gonna download, install and run that on Sunday (but didn't get round to doing it). Will do that, tonight.


On a separate note, weirdly, my work PC acquired some viruses last week, and the IT Dept. did indeed successfully kill them with Spybot.

 

Anything stand out as obvious?:-

 

Have you tried shutting down your torrent software for a bit to see if that helps? Someone could be seeding off you.

 

Well Opera is using an absurd amount of memory. How many pages do you have open with it? I'd have to open about 15 different sites on Chrome to get that sort of memory dump.

Photoscape seems to be using a bit but not sure what it is exactly.

AVG is using quite a bit too but you'd expect that.

utorrent shouldn't be running if you want to use the internet.

 

Yeah, closed utorrent for an extended period as I thought it was contributing. So reopened it to doublecheck. But it doesn't seem to make a difference, whether shut down or opened.

Admittedly there's currently only one torrent in my list that's seeding (no other torrents in the list either) - but it's currently inactive anyway!

Don't worry about PhotoScape - it was simply used to get the screendumps of TM (have now shut it down).

LOL! Yeah, I have lots of pages open - but it never used to be a problem. In any case I've tried tests with just one page open and it don't seem to make a difference.

As it happens, the internet is currently loading pages quickly - but then other times, they'll take an age...

 

Well next time it is being a douche open up the task manager and sort by Memory. If something is using more than 80k then it's being excessive for a notebook.

 

Ah, okay. Circa 80k eh? Good to know, ta.

Yeah, netbook's working lovely at the mo; fast and slick...

 

Sorry, thanks for all the help everyone - it really HAS helped.

 

Opera is not the best Browser,i've used this before,but in my opinion switch to Firefox or Google Chrome,both are in my opinion best..

I've tried few and really Opera is not the best.



Jura

 

Chrome is supposed to fastest isn't it? Beta based?

I used Firefox for ages but then switched to Opera - prefer the latter. Found it to load pages appreciably quicker.

But none of them are any better than each other when the netbook decides to go on its go-slow sessions, anyway!...