I need the expertise of somebody more expert than myself. :)
Last week I downloaded and installed a Flash update for Firefox. Since then when I open Firefox it eats a huge amount of system resources, and any time I go to a page with Flash, it gives me an error message and suggests I restart Navigator. My CPU usage zings up to 100% and stays there, making it more or less impossible to do anything else with the computer.
I’ve run a Windows update.
ETA: Also, while I’m doing slightly geeky things, how do I set up an email bounce so I can just bounce stuff all toward one email address? I’ve got shell access to the account I want to do this with. I just donno know to do it. :)
I don’t know for sure, but you may need to try booting your computer in safe mode and then going to add/remove programs. Somethings you just can’t get rid of otherwise.
If your computer is lagging, you also might want to defrag.
In my old unix days I used a .forward file to aim mail to where I wanted it to go, so if your shell account is unix-flavoured you could try that:
http://www.cs.siu.edu/computing/unix/email-intro.html#tailor
Here are some ideas for dealing with your Flash issue:
http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/disable_flash.asp
Though it doesn’t mention it on that page, Firefox and Flash have a history of not getting along well, so there may be other suggestions somewhere about how to get Firefox and Flash 9 to play well together.
Oops, I thought I emailed this to you.
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_14157
My faveroite part is this:
“Due to recent enhancements with the Flash Player installers,…”
Isn’t marketing wonderful. We’re too cheap to pay our programmers and, and I ought not to rant on someone elses space.
That was easy enough that I feel a little silly for asking. Thank you!
You’re welcome :)
Something that might not be a bad idea to try out is a Firefox Extention called, I think, ‘Flash Block’. What this does is turns off all flash until you click on them to play. So, you can still watch the flash videos you want, but a lot of the really obnoxious ads go away. It might help you survive casual browsing until you figure out the real Flash issue. (And, on those pages, you can just run them in IE. There’s multiple extentions for that, too – one that launches the curernt page in an IE window, and another that actually loads up IE into a firefox tab.)
Appallingly, it does not seem WinXP Home Edition *can* be booted in safe mode. WTF, over.
Um, ok. I swear you can. When your computer is loading it won’t give you the special screen, but before it fully loads just hit F8. It’s possible I have the same XP as well and I do it all the time.
I did, several times. The only boot option I get is XP Home Edition.
Well that’s very odd. My nerdiness has all worn out, I have no idea what to do from there, sorry. Maybe there’s a different access point, I can look around for info if you like.