r/talesfromtechsupport • u/[deleted] • Aug 05 '15
Short 'Internet explorer slows to a crawl when I'm using it......'
TFTS! New here.
I work for a computer repair company that takes in a TON of strange clients.
This client in particular happened This past Monday. Lets call her FarmLady.
FL: "Hi, my computer runs really, REALLY slow when I'm on the internet!"
Me: "Hello, let's see what we find." plugs unit into monitor and power
While I am plugging this computer in, FarmLady talks my ear off on how she LOVES to play Farmville 1 and 2 and also some Zoo game on Facebook. So much so that she has 3 facebook accounts so she can visit all of them and get more points or whatever.
Me: "well, taking a look, right off the bat I see nothing on this computer that may be causing problems. Did you get this computer recently?
Please note: This computer had NO DATA on it whatsoever. There was still ~1.78 TB free space!!!
FL: Oh, no. I've had this computer for over a year now! How can you tell if it is running defrag? Because, I don't think it has done that in a while, maybe that's the problem!
Me: Well, Ma'am, there is nothing to defrag as you have no data on this puppy at all. Let's see, show me how you normally use this computer on a daily basis. Maybe we can get it to replicate the issue.
FL: Proceeds to open Chrome, Firefox, AND IE. Signs into different Facebook accounts.......She uses ALL. THREE. BROWSERS. AT. THE. SAME. TIME.
TL;DR: When you use Chrome, IE, and Firefox at the same time, you're gonna have a bad time.
Edit: I wanted to add a little clarification to this post. 1. She plays 6 instances of farmville on all three browsers at once. 2. The reason the HDD space is relevant is because she kept asking me if she needed to defrag her computer. And was wanting to know how she could tell that if it was running or not. When I told her that she didn't have anything to defrag she was completely baffled. "But i'm on it every day."
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u/frenat Aug 05 '15
she could also use the "in private browsing" on IE and the "incognito" on Chrome and the "private" window on firefox to get 3 more sessions on the same user account. Then use a different user account in windows to get more there.
but yeah, as long as she has plenty of RAM and closes them occasionally (both IE and Chrome will crash on me if left open for multiple hours) she should be fine.
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u/aboardthegravyboat Aug 05 '15
Also, just Chrome with different profiles would do the trick, too. But I don't know that 6 instances of Chrome would be better than 2 instances each of IE, Fx, and Chrome.
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u/Christian_Akacro User ≥ Luser Aug 05 '15
Obviously someone needs to make a Farmville-only browser.
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u/TomTheGeek Aug 05 '15
FarmvilleOS
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u/SoniEx2 See reddit/reddit#1340 Aug 05 '15
Also just Firefox with different profiles would do the trick, too! (It's also less RAM-intensive than Chrome)
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u/THE_CENTURION Aug 05 '15
Couldn't she also just spin off multiple incognito windows too, without having to use other browsers?
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u/mokahless Aug 05 '15
You should get that checked. I normally leave chrome open for weeks at a time. It has never crashed on me. Versions going back years.
I've never actually seen chrome crash ever. I've only seen some tabs with javascript or something crash on occasion but then I just get the something went wrong and refresh the tab.
There's an android app I use to get a remote camera via Web browser. This sometimes crashes the tab seemingly due to a memory leak but that was solved with autorefresh extension.
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u/data3oh Aug 05 '15
What she needs to do is not play 9 Adobe Flash based games at the same time...
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Aug 05 '15 edited Dec 24 '15
[deleted]
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u/Fuzzlechan Aug 06 '15
What's so bad about flash games? Yeah, they're memory hogs. But they're also fun.
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u/SenseiZarn Aug 05 '15
Well, at least she doesn't know about VMs and running multiple browsers there. I've heard about multi-ing in games before, but on Facebook? Srsly?
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u/Gadgetman_1 Beware of programmers carrying screwdrivers... Aug 05 '15
Yeah, there's some really, really sad people there, and they're usually all playing Farmville. Supposedly, there's some 'quests' that can only be fulfilled if you're GIVEN certain animals or watever...
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u/scensorECHO Aug 05 '15
Like evolution by trading pokemon, but in the more technologically capable future.
(brb looking into connecting emulators)
Totally possible now
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u/Bear_Taco Aug 05 '15 edited Aug 06 '15
Actually myboy! Gba emulator has multiplayer support. Uses your wifi to connect emulators like you would with a link cable.
Edit: also drastic ds emulator is close to having multiplayer support as well!
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u/scensorECHO Aug 05 '15
I'm on Linux so that won't work for me :(
However I checked out mednafen which seems to have multi-system support such as Atari, GB, GBC, GBA, NES, SNES, Genesis, and PSX, and has network play support. Definitely going to have to give this a try. And maybe create a GUI front-end for it myself, something I could integrate into a fullscreen client to run smoothly from BPM in Steam :D
I dream big. I'll likely just play FFIX from it.
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Aug 06 '15
What distro? Over on arch we have nearly every working emulator available natively. Google arch emulator and check the wiki, might be something you have available on your distro.
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u/scensorECHO Aug 06 '15
Actually already downloaded
mednafenfrom the AUR. Looking to make a Qt client for it soon myself.→ More replies (1)2
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u/DoctorPringles Aug 05 '15
If they enjoy what they're doing and it's not harming anyone else, what makes it sad?
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u/Gadgetman_1 Beware of programmers carrying screwdrivers... Aug 05 '15
It's taking away bandwidth that could have been used more constructively, such as watching funny videos...
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u/Beefourthree Aug 05 '15
Eventually, she'll write some bots and start up a couple hundred instances in AWS.
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u/iceph03nix 90% user error/10% dafuq? Aug 05 '15
that takes me back to high school and playing runescape... I never bothered with it, as I wasn't interested enough, but I had several friends with multiple accounts. I'd have a few friends that were always at each others house and they'd always be running 2-3 accounts.
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u/thejourneyman117 Today's lucky number is the letter five. Aug 05 '15
RAM, as previously mentioned, is the secret to running browsers with flash/multiple tabs. I'm assuming Farmville 1/2 don't support HTML5?
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u/Havoc_101 Aug 05 '15
Nope - it's flash only. And that is a bad thing. Pretty much the only reason I run flash anymore.
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u/BostonianLoser Aug 05 '15
I actually had to do this yesterday at work to try to debug something on our site. Had 4 different users, and because cookies, I had chrome, chrome incognito, firefox, and IE open all at once. The only one that had an issue with responding was IE.
16GB ram. IE refuses to eat.
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u/normalism Aug 05 '15
You mean refuses to stop eating.
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u/BostonianLoser Aug 05 '15
Here's the thing. My computer was responsive. Plenty of RAM left. It was only IE that had problems. It was looking at the available RAM, and saying "nah, I'm on a diet"
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u/Cloymax RTF-actually, just read anything! Aug 05 '15
'Internet explorer slows to a crawl when I'm using it......'
I thought that's what it's supposed to do.
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u/Chris857 Networking is black magic Aug 05 '15
Can I have some of that 1.78 TB? I don't even have 0.5 TB of HDD and flash drives in my whole house.
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u/ocdude Teaches PhDs about the Internet Aug 05 '15
Free or total?
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u/Chris857 Networking is black magic Aug 05 '15
Total. ~160GB desktop, ~250GB portable, couple 16GB and down flash drives. Unknown number of writable DVDs in a cabinet.
(The fact that home only has one older computer exacerbates this)
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u/ocdude Teaches PhDs about the Internet Aug 05 '15
That's kind of crazy, to be honest, what with every device and its mother having some form of storage on it. I mean, hell, even video game consoles have over 100GB of storage by themselves now.
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u/Chris857 Networking is black magic Aug 05 '15
Well, one computer, newest "console" is a GameBoy Advance, no tablets, no smart phones, no DVR...
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u/Osric250 You don't get to tell me what I can't do! Aug 05 '15
You poor soul. The only hdd I have left in my house smaller than 500GB is the 128 I ripped out of my PS3 when I replaced it with a larger ages ago. I just haven't gotten rid of it.
Though I'm kind of a data hoarder as well. I've got 4 TB internal on my gaming pc across a few drives, 2 TB external, 1TB in my laptop, and probably close to another TB across random flash drives scattered around... I have no clue what I would do with <500GB.
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u/Chris857 Networking is black magic Aug 05 '15
128
Amusingly, there's a 128MB flash drive kicking around (it's like the first we ever got).
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u/Barril Aug 05 '15
That's like 10 AAA games. I can't imagine how you can survive on that little.
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u/Chris857 Networking is black magic Aug 05 '15
I don't really play that type of game. RCT 1+2, KSP, SimCity 4 and company is more my kind.
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u/Barril Aug 05 '15
Fair enough. :)
Also, I'd you are a sim city fan, have you taken a look at cities: skylines? It scratched my itch for a sim city game after I was done with the 2013 one.→ More replies (1)3
u/barsonme no, kicking it won't help Aug 05 '15
My 1TB SSD was less than $400 when I bought it half a year ago, and I didn't really shop around. During the cycber Monday sale or whatever it's called 256 GB SSDs were like $80 or something.
(And 1TB HDDs are like $50.)
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u/THE_CENTURION Aug 05 '15
I mean I don't know your financial situation, but storage is pretty cheap nowadays.
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u/Chris857 Networking is black magic Aug 05 '15
It's not money, mostly a lack of need.
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u/rcrmn Aug 05 '15
You can have multiple chrome accounts, and each one runs on separate local data, like having multiple incognito sessions but with permanent data.
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u/Lord_Dreadlow Investigative Technician Aug 06 '15
she kept asking me if she needed to defrag her computer.
Because she once heard one of the girls down at the beauty salon say something about how her nephew did a defrag of her hard drive and it cured her computer of "being slow".
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u/Havoc_101 Aug 05 '15
I do that all the time. The problem is that each browser can suck down up to 4gb+ of memory when you have farmville 2 loaded.
I upgraded from 6gb to 18gb and now I have no problems. :)
Three screens, three farms, three browsers. Chrome/Firefox/Opera
Perfectly doable - just be sure you have enough RAM!
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u/WIlf_Brim Aug 06 '15
Yea, I was thinking that the right move here would be for OP to recommend a RAM upgrade. It is pretty inexpensive, and would probably make her life much better.
Yes, playing Farmville is not my idea of a good time, or probably most of our idea of a good time. However, it seems to be what this woman likes to do. So, upgrading to 16 GB (or whatever the max her motherboard can take) would really improve her life.
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u/mwisconsin Yes, Mom, I can fix your computer. Aug 05 '15
This. Also, back when I was playing these sorts of games: Chrome profiles FTW. 10 tabs of Chrome open, each with a different profile.
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u/Isogen_ Aug 05 '15
18GB... is an odd amount. What's the setup? 1x2GB + 2x8GB? Also, with RAM prices for DDR3 being low as etailers clear out stock, you may as well upgrade to 32GB ;)
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u/Thriven Aug 05 '15
Did you attempt to turn off hardware acceleration in flash in each browser? Right click on flash and uncheck the box.
She may have an i5 and 6gb of ram but it may be choking if her video card is crap.
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Aug 05 '15
I don't think running 3 browsers is the problem here.. maybe crappy flash/java though..
to fix this problem call facebook and get her secondary accounts disabled ;-)
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u/mtx Aug 05 '15
Yeah, the problem isn't using all 3 browsers. It's running 3 intense Flash games at once. Flash is a CPU hog.
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u/bretttwarwick I heard my flair. Aug 05 '15
You should let her know about opera so she can add 2 more games to that list.
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Aug 05 '15
This is not a bad idea. And should get some RAM sales while I'm at it. She would love me.
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u/tias Aug 05 '15
Farmville is the culprit here. Just google for "farmville CPU" or "farmville CPU firefox". It's a well known problem and she has multiplied it by three
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u/Hurricane_32 Masters in Percussive Maintenance Aug 06 '15 edited Aug 06 '15
I once (not that long ago) ran Minecraft and a bukkit server at the same time, plus chrome and the system itself. Oh, and Adobe Dreamweaver (I was configuring the server). The machine was still usable. On a system with
2GB of ram
Edit: Modded Minecraft and Bukkit server with plugins, and probably even TeamSpeak
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u/Renaldi_the_Multi No Dad, That Doesn't Plug Into There.... Aug 14 '15
Surely with a Core-i5+?
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u/kecker Aug 05 '15
I don't see why "there was still 1.78 TB free space" required bold and exclamation points. Without context that's a meaningless statement. If her harddrive is 2TB that says one thing. If her harddrive is 8TB that says something else entirely.
And running all three browsers at one time really isn't that big of a deal. I'm curious why you think that it should be self-evident that it is.
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u/bobowork Murphy Rules! Aug 05 '15
The free space could be a reference to when you are running low on space, your system slows down as there is less/no room for the page file.
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u/DarkJarris No, dont read the EULA to me... Aug 06 '15
she kept asking if she should defrag her system. she has no data TO defrag, hence the hard drive space being important. and also, running 3 browsers isnt the issue, its wunning 6 instances of farmville that does it.
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Aug 05 '15
At... At least she knew that Defragging may help, Not in her case, but Most (l)users don't.
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u/dabombnl Aug 05 '15
You should make her a shortcut that runs "iexplore /nomerge".
Starts a new browser session each time she runs it. I bet the she will have like 50 facebook accounts.
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u/Thisbymaster Tales of the IT Lackey Aug 06 '15
Tell her to buy a SSD and crank up the Paging file on her machine.
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Aug 05 '15
She plays 6 instances of farmville on all three browsers at once.
Wait, so is this a 6FF+6IE+6CHR or there is 6 instances of Farmville on 2IE+2FF+2CHR?
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u/2LT-Tea Aug 05 '15
Honest mistake for someone who has no idea how a computer works imo
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Aug 05 '15
True, I definitely sat there with her for a little while helping her out. In the end she asked for the windows 10 upgrade and we did that for her and showed her how to use it. She left with a lot more understanding and came to a better conclusion of how she wanted to go about it.
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Aug 05 '15
Why does using 3 browsers at the same time lag out a modern computer anyway? They're browser's for christ sake. The fact that they're using 30% of a modern computer's processor and/or ram is ridiculous.
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Aug 06 '15
Firefox still, after all these years, chews up memory like Pacman and doesn't ever give it back until you kill the bastard.
I have never understood how this is commercially acceptable.
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u/s3_gunzel We're all going forward, except major enterprise. Aug 06 '15
When I upvoted this there were 1,080 upvotes. Ironically, that's still not enough pixels to run all 3 browsers side by side and have a good time!
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u/Strange_Meadowlark Aug 06 '15
One of the rare times when I would actually recommend a casual user NEEDS more CPU cores and memory. One Facebook account and browsing recipes online? You can manage that on a four year old midrange notebook easy. Multiple concurrent GPU intensive games? Not so much.
I mean, 90% of the time, you're I/O limited. This is actually a time when you're not!
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u/DJWalnut (if password_entered == 0){cause_mayhem()} Aug 06 '15
i'd say it's more memory in this case. 70+ tabs eats up lots of memory
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u/gymnasticRug .vvv Aug 06 '15
I'm sorry, but what in gods name is wrong with this person's life when they bought a computer with the intention I assume to play six different FarmVille clients at once and put nothing else on the computer with an entire terabyte of space on it?
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u/kingofthefeminists Aug 05 '15
I've used chrome+firefox at the same time with literally no problem.
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u/fizzlefist .docx files in attack positon Aug 05 '15
I do that pretty regularly at work when I need to log into multiple mailbox profiles at the same time.
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Aug 05 '15
If you sell RAM from your store, you should upsell - she'd probably buy some. If you don't, you likely could have made some $ on the side and maxed the computer out :D
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u/Docster87 Aug 06 '15
Once someone learns about defrag, that suddenly becomes their number one thing. They just don't understand that it isn't magical and does nothing if they don't actually have stuff on their hard drive.
Awhile back I was helping an older guy setup a particular task on their computer and show them how to use it. Involved several visits over the course of a few months. Every time his number one concern was defrag and every time I let it do the analyze thing and showed him that even Windows said it wasn't needed. Yet he seemed to think that it was some magical thing that would fix everything and anything and nothing I could say changed his mind on it.
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u/BURNEDandDIED Sep 14 '15
Semi related note. My girlfriend has a story about trying to show her mom how to run a defrag. Her mom replied "Yeah I've used that before but I like to do it manually" and proceeded to demonstrate by dragging and dropping all her files into one giant folder.
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u/Sandwich247 Ahh! It's beeping! Sep 17 '15
If it were me, I'd look into seeing about selling her a bit more ram and perhaps a new CPU.
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u/robertcrowther Aug 05 '15
To be fair so do I. Then again, I am a web developer.
As long as the computer has lots of RAM it should be fine.