h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The PC has been getting terribly slow lately, and Firefox has become almost unusable on some websites, especially when doing a Google search. That's probably something to do with all the anti-script, anti-malware, anti-everything add-ons I've loaded it up with.

It got to the point a few weeks ago where I couldn't open certain pages and certain websites. I mean, they just wouldn't load - sat there for three or four minutes until Firefox said the page wasn't available. Hit the 'Try again' button... same thing, over and over again.

Unfortunately, my MP page was one of them... but only in Goo, and I could get to entries in Goo.

Then, a few weeks ago it got so bad that I called the ISP on the Saturday morning. We did a traceroute to google.com and I got a few asterisks, suggesting a problem. I'd already explained about the add-ons to the bloke on the phone but he was convinced it was a network problem and insisted on sending someone over... the following Thursday.

After the call, during which he reset some things, it seemed like everything was running okay, until Monday when it came back in spades. I did another traceroute (google.com) and got nothing but timeouts. Traceroute yahoo.com - no problem. Try google.com again - nothing but timeouts. Try microsoft.com - first eight hops okay then nothing but timeouts.

The techie arrived on Thursday morning, suggested that my eight-year-old modem might be the problem, and replaced it.

And it's been fine again, until today. No MP page, and the same, weird thing with Wikipedia* - it would load in Firefox but not in Chrome. On the other hand, the MP page would load in Chrome but not in Firefox. Of course, I'm not logged in on Chrome.

So I called the ISP again this morning, had a long chat with a very helpful woman called Ruth, tried a few things, including one that I should have tried before even called the ISP first time - try the laptop on the modem (I don't have a router). It's one of those things that's so obvious... y'know

Anyway, the upshot is that I've backed everything up and once again I find myself wiping a hard drive before re-installing the operating system. If you've only got the one hard drive to deal with it's not much of a problem. The only thing you really have to worry about is 'have I backed up *everything* I need. When you've got five hard drives - the C drive plus two 1TB and two 2TB, and between the latter four you've got 4.5TB of files that you really don't want to lose, and you've got one important piece of software which, if you forget to back up the .dat file for it you're going to have to manually load 2,500 files, one at a time...

In that situation you have swallow very hard before you hit that button that irrevocably wipes the C drive. I did select the right drive, didn't I? Yes, it must be - it's the only one that's 250GB. It's got be the right one.

Gulp.

*I discovered an even weirder thing with Wikipedia and Google this morning. Wikipedia would load just fine in Firefox (well, a little slow but it loaded) from a search via the Firefox search field. If I copied the url to Chrome it'd also load just fine, but if I tried to load a Wikipedia article from a Google search result it wouldn't load the page.

Nah
I'm getting the same here
Looks like DNS failures, which suggests someone is buggering about bigtime.

I have a feeling Chrome doesn't use the default DNS settings and routes stuff through Google instead, which might be why it sometimes works when firefox falls over.

Incidentally, does anyone know a good free firewall that isn't Zone Alarm? That used to be such a good piece of software. Then they changed the interface and the way it works, making it a right royal pain in the bum and not half as useful. And now they ask you to check boxes that'll change settings on your PC that it has no place changing before it'll update, such as 'Make Zone Alarm Search your home page on all browsers'.

Are you kidding? On yer bike

And we're back

No, we're not

A brand new, clean, fresh install of Firefox, and it's doing it again This http://www.h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/classic/MP147203 won't load, only now it's giving me an error message instead of the generic 'Page cannot be loaded' message with the 'Try again; button:

XML Parsing Error: unexpected parser state Location: jar:file:///C:/Program%20Files%20(x86)/Mozilla%20Firefox/omni.ja!/chrome/toolkit/content/global/netError.xhtml Line Number 305, Column 54: &netTimeout.longDesc;

That wasn't happening before.

I did manage to get the page open before I loaded any add-ons do it has to be one of those - either NoScript, AdBlock Plus or the Avast antivirus extension.

Nope, we've gone back to:

The connection was reset

The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments.
If you are unable to load any pages, check your computer's network connection.
If your computer or network is protected by a firewall or proxy, make sure that Firefox is permitted to access the Web.

[Try again]



So I'm in Pliny instead of Goo

I can't open that page either, but I think it's a pliny problem because it gives me pliny's Oops page.

I've been having issues with brunel links on my personal space that have worked up until this last week.

I think I might have figured it out.

I uninstalled Firefox and tried to reinstall it, but when I opened the installer, which downloads the latest Firefox version, it just sat there trying to download... for 15 minutes. When I did that earlier it downloaded straight away, as it has done just now. The same thing happened when I tried to check for an update to VLC Player.

Until I uninstalled my Avast antivirus.

Now it seems like everything's back to normal, although I'm still getting timeouts to google.com on the traceroute.

Except now i don't have an antivirus. Looks like I'll have to go back to AVG, although there was a reason, which I can't recall now, why I switched from AVG to Avast.

I'm not going to roll the PC back to a restore point before I installed Avast because I've installed 100+ Windows updates since then.

its address error see "dna/h2g2" should only be one in link you have two

You're right, although I copied it straight from the address bar, which came from my bookmarks, which is how I'm here now, and the second dna/h2g2 doesn't show up in the posted link.

How very curious.

I wonder when the last Avast update was? I think I recall being prompted to update the program recently. Perhaps that;s where the problem lies. It;s hardly unknown, although a lot less common these days, for updates to break things.

I'm not getting timeouts on the google.com traceroute any more.

I'll have to reinstall everything one program, add-on, application at a time and observe what, if anything, happens before installing the next one.

Starting with Comodo firewall.

Zone Alarm used to be so easy to use. When a new program tried to access the internet or receive incoming connections a pop-up would appear down by the system tray asking if you want to allow it and with a checkbox asking if you want Zone Alarm to remember your choice, so that you could let it know either yes, I trust that program or no, I'll only let that one through one connection at a time.

Then the program was added to a list which you could easily configure for incoming and outgoing connections, or banning a program from accessing the internet completely with a simple click in a field.

Then they messed that up completely, plus, whenever you allowed a restricted, one-connection-at-a-time program to access the internet, such as an updater, Zone Alarm would reset the program's setting to access-all-areas

No, don't do that.

So we'll see how Comodo works. So far so good.

Avast has been reinstalled; we'll see how that goes.

I've discovered this afternoon that Ghostery might be what was slowing Firefox down to a crawl and hanging it up on so many sites, particularly Google searches. But I really don't want to get rid of that one. This installation of Firefox is only a day or two old but when I checked the cookies a short while ago it was stiff with unpleasantness from the likes of Doubleclick, Statcounter and Bob knows how many other people I don't want tracking my browsing habits.

On yer bike

After removing them I added Ghostery, but since then the browser has started hanging again on some pages, and especially on anything to do with Google.

Just testing.

http://www.h2g2.com/dna/h2g2/classic/MP147203

The link is still broken in the h2g2 code. That extra /dna/h2g2/ is still being wedged into the URL.

And yet it shows correctly and works in Pliny
Takes you to Gosho's posting page in classic Goo

MP147203

does this work?

Nope

Try This
http://www.h2g2.com/classic/MP147203

nope

http://www.h2g2.com/MP147203

This is really not very helpful
And is probably in Pastey's list of it's a DNA problem and we can't fix it.

Yep, and I had to do it in safe mode. I still can't connect to that page in either Firefox or Chrome - I can only access h2g2 in Pliny. It started doing that again this morning after having been fine since the OS reinstall I did on... Friday?

Nor can I connect to mozilla.org nor a handful of other sites either, in both browsers, unless I'm in safe mode. Same thing with the Firefox installer - it won't connect to download the program.

Still getting all those traceroute timeouts to google.com too, and always after three hops.

And yet all connectivity is fine in safe mode. I wonder what's getting in the way?

Can you do me a favour, BG? Copy that link, take out the extra /dna/h2g2/, go to the page (it should be Goo), then copy the url from your address bar and post it here.



Cos this is really pissing me off.