OT: Computery-related stuff (firefox and wireless related)

"L'homme d'AstraVan" gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

There's no way that the browser you use can make your wireless connection drop.

Wireless uses a number of channels - most of which overlap. If there's another network on the same or an overlapping channel near you, it can cause problems with the connection. And, of course, everybody always sticks on the default for their router. Go into the router's setup (preferably connected by a network cable, not wireless...) and change the channel. Move it to the opposite end. Shift it to somewhere in the middle. Basically, piss around until you find one that works reliably.

If that still doesn't work, download the latest version of the driver for your wireless card from the manufacturer's site, and install and use that.

Hmm, I'm not sure. Microsoft Office, which shouldn't have any need to do so, does some weird shit over wireless. It checks for other copies of Office within range of the computer on which it is running and it seems to access the wireless card directly or to do something very odd indeed because AFAICT it completely bypasses any firewall on the system.

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And Firefox is great :o)

%steve%@malloc.co.uk (Steve Firth) gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Mmm. Never come across that. That'll be "unpublished API" behaviour...

It's fairly obviously done for licence checking, but it does seem (a) a bit naughty and (b) obviously capable of crashing the wireless card. It also makes me wonder if IE does the same thing.

Just get rid of FireFox then. There's no need for not using IE6 really for a casual, non-geek browser like yourself. I've never had a problem with it, boots instantly, it never fails to display a page right, all pages work on it etc etc, what more do you really need? It's only a web browser, all it has to do is show webpages, nothing more really. I've never had a virus from it or anything nasty like that either.

Unless you're just using it so you can pretend you hate MS and all that stuff, and to be different like some geek kids do heh, then I dunno, find a forum of virgins and get one of them to fix it.

It's not firefox that's causing it, there is a bug in one of the recent "Auto update" things Micro$hite installs that crashes one of the older versions of Firefox. The latest Firefox doesn't suffer.

Well Firefox is indeed shit, it became popular as a "cool" browser for "1337" users but it's in reality a bit shoddy and has for as long as it has been about known to suffer memory allocation problems, and CPU use issues (depending on your WNIC these can cause driver issues). If you are after an alternative try Opera.

Thing is, it's not crashing firefox as such, it's still running fine - just without fail the wireless goes from green to red literally within seconds of firefox loading.

And I'm not some weirdy anti-M$ freak either - got firefox 'cos IE6 crashed too much - consistently on stuff like youtube/facebook on heavily java/flash (I forget which) reliant pages, which firefox never did. But now firefox seems to cause things to not work at all, I'm back to IE. Firefox was always mentally resource-hungry, but did always seem rock solid, bar the odd bit of waiting due to PC-ancientness/shiteness.

Firefox eats memory. I've seen it chew up 800meg in a 1gig machine that hasn't been rebooted for a while. 3 is better than 2 but it still does it,

Are you sure you aren't running out of memory launching Firefox.

Doubt it - I'm well aware of how resource-hungry it is, having watched the "memory used" figure in task manager go up and up and up several times before. But loads of times in the past I've had several tabs open (anything from 3 or 4 to 10+) and it's still worked fine, so I don't think that it's a lack of memory left for the wireless card to work. Surely that's what VM/swapfile is for?

To be fair it just sounds to me like your PC is a heap :-) Have you considered getting a Mac? They cost more, and have the same hardware that goes out of date just as quickly these days - but you get to be smug about it. They also seem to have just as many issues as PCs, but you're not allowed to mention them. Although, as a PC user, you can quote this page at them endlessly -

The words of someone who has never owned and probably never used a Mac.

Katie still uses an 8 year old Powerbook, it's running the OSX equivalent of running XP at the moment (ie. 1 generation behind) and I have a G4 Cube in my home office doing all my server type stuff - although it's an ancient machine with a 450MHz processor, it's absolutely fine for just about any everyday use.

On the other hand, I've been through around 4 Windows boxes in the same time as Katie has had her Powerbook.

If you have a laptop, regardless who made it, and your needs never change, of course you'd never need to upgrade. They don't get worse at doing the same thing. If you start trying to use software that they're not up to etc, then of course you'd need to upgrade, as you would with a Mac. If Katie is still doing the same stuff on it she's always done, of course it'll be fine. If on the other hand she starts to want to use new Photoshop or do some video editing or graphics design work, she'd need a new one.

What do you mean, 'been through' 4 Windows boxes? They've broken? Or you've wanted to do more exciting stuff on them and needed to upgrade?

Frankly, that's rubbish.

It started off on OS9, then OSX10.1 through to 10.4.

It has also had 3 different versions of Photoshop on it, also a couple of versions of Adobe Illustrator and it appears web browsers get updated overnight these days.

Also, although she's never used it for video editing, it'll do that quite nicely, thanks. Because it's something that Macs have always been good at. Unlike even her 6 month old Vista laptop, for example.

Partially because bits have broken, partially because every time you upgrade some software it slows the machin down to such a level that it becomes useless. Which, as I've said up there, hasn't happened with the Mac.

They were bad examples, mainly cos I don't know what things it is in Photoshop that makes people want more power heh, cos I never use it for anything more than light fudgery of pictures. What is the spec of said Vista laptop as a matter of interest?

I was more aiming towards things which require a lot of memory etc, encoding and the like - they will always be faster the more power and RAM you have. Encoding say, a full DVD to a video file, or making a single movie file from lots of cut up bits of others, and added titles blah blah is something that just takes less time dependant on your amounts of power. I won't mention stuff like CAD etc cos that doesn't matter to most home users - but again, the more power the better. Such things would take hours on something with crap RAM and CPU.

Heh, that's never happened to me either surprisingly enough, although I would suggest instead of just binning the whole box, you could upgrade it... If you buy decent bits, they don't break either, nor do they need upgrading again soon, but they do cost more.

I can't be bothered to do PCs vs Macs again today, it's not as if I'm suddenly going to go "My god he's right!" or you're going to say "Dammit I admit I was just taken in my the advertising, Macs are shit" are you :-)

But if you want we can say you win, although seemingly you own more Windows based things in your house than Mac things...?

So the measure of how good a computer is is how hard you can hit it? :-)

Presumably Macs are better at that as you do end up bashing your head against them so often after they have just crashed again.

Have you use a Mac since OS9......

I very much doubt it, 'cos OSX just doesn't crash.

I think I've only had one or two 'kernel' panics in the 2 years I've had my MacBook. Can't remember having many on the old Powerbooks / iBooks either.