You say run Firefox? So how come my Firefox takes forever to load? I've gone back to Explorer.
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You say run Firefox? So how come my Firefox takes forever to load? I've gone back to Explorer.
I asked Time Warner how much down/upload speed I have; they told me, (I have 1.41 down, 0.21 up) and did the speedtest and found it to be near what it should be. This answer (above) left me hanging. OK, so which cable speed do I need? I can't listen to YouTube videos without some buffering. It also takes over 3 hours for me to upload a hi def video to them. And my Firefox crashes most of the time I try to do that. Of course, I may have over 90 tabs open at the time (I get a lot of crashes, which started all of a sudden some months ago with firefox). I've also endured the occasional choppy Vonage reception and the Vonage people are tearing their hair out trying to figure it out. And I called up Linksys to see if it was my wireless router, and they had me pay $40 for six months of tech support with it (which hasn't helped AT ALL).
I have a Windows XP machine with 4 GB ram, 2 yrs old.
I had 1.5Mb down on AT&T last year and found it adequate, usually with the same test results you had.
I also found that in the last two years, I have to control the files put on my computer by surfing. Running CCleaner regularly to rid my browser and system of temporary files,clipboard, etc. was necessary to complete loading pages reliably. If you get tired of doing that every 5 minutes then try Adaware Aniversary Edition Free with AdWatch enabled, and you will only have to scan with it once every couple of hours or day or two.
I bought MBAMs lifetime license and now almost never have problems, but I still clean with CCleaner at least once a week.
Bear in mind, there is a limit to how many tabs you can open if you have a limited amount of RAM space. Theoretically you can get away with murder, but let's face it, having that many tabs open is a little excessive.
The most likely issue you have is probably updating; if you don't keep FireFox, your operating system, and all plug-ins, add-ons, and applications updated, you can have the same problems.
CNET has an update checker, but I use File Hippo's, as it is very efficient, and uses almost no resources.
Firefox seems to have its own updater which comes up in a window of its own and updates all the add ons.
How many open tabs is too many?
Would it help if I distributed them across open sessions of firefox?
Is this why it crashes even if I'm not even doing anything with it at the time?
Browsing is affected by the health of the installation, if you don't keep all updates going, it can affect Firefox. In fact Microsoft got into trouble for deliberately installing an update that made FireFox vulnerable!!
Thankfully both MS and Mozzilla fixed that problem!
You only need one session window open really. The limit on tabs is only limited by your particular PC's CPU cycle rate, and the RAM you have on board.
A typical weather radar page will use 100Mb for example; this can add up very fast. None of my clients are getting away with anything less than a Gb of RAM now-a-days; which is unfortunately because security software uses a lot of it.
Just the operating system alone seems to be using 500Mb + or -. XP is getting pretty bloated now, if it is fully updated. I've had to forgo IE 8 on slower machines that have only 678Mbs of RAM, and they have minimal very lightweight anti-virus and anti-malware, so this is quickly shoving older PCs off the web.
That same PC loads the newest version of FF veeeerrry slowly, but once open, it surfs pretty fast. Needless to say, I don't open very many tabs on that one! ![]()
If your son connects with a wireless router maybe here is an explanation. My neighbor has a very fast cable installation. He has me hook up a wireless router to his PlayStation 2. Unfortunately his PS 2
would not play with any of the security coded we could create, We had to leave the router without a security code. Maybe you have a neighbor freeloading off your signal. I never figured a working solution to this problem.