Web pages degrade when online

[Fra]

A friend has a P120 running Win 95, IE 5 and 24mb Ram. When using the internet the screen degrades, eg. the pointer develops a block like tail, any text gradually disappears and the icons go fuzzy on the toolbar.
This doesn't happen off-line and if you refresh the page everything is OK again but then it will start to degrade after a while, leaving the text unreadable.
The graphics card is trio 3dfx if l remember correctly.
I don't know whether the modem is a hardware/software type.

TIA
Fran

[Budfred]

It sounds like it is time for your friend to download and use a good Antivirus, spyware and adware program. Try this link for a number of good choices:

http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15179

I use SpyBot and AdAware. I also use Norton Antivirus, but I have heard a lot of good things about AVG on this forum. It may also be worthwhile to get a Trojan scanner since that could also be the source of your friends problem.

Good luck,
Budfred

[Fra]

Cheers Budfred for the reply.

I know, he has no AV software. I just had it in my head that it could of been hardware related.
I use AVG myself, l will get him to download a copy for himslf, it definetly won't do any harm.

Thanks

Fran

[Paul Komski]

This doesn't happen off-line
What about a free firewall? like ZA (http://www.zonelabs.com) or KPF (http://www.kerio.com/us/kpf_home.html)

When on-line; does this happen at all or at specific sites?

[Fra]

Paul, l think it happens on all sites. It did the evening l was there.
I think the AV route, will be a start and see if that makes any difference.
I tried working in different programs off-line and nothing unusual happened. It just seems to be when the PC's on-line.

Cheers

Fran

[kayofcircles]

Sorry to butt in here, Fra , but I was wondering if you got your printer problem solved this week?

On this thread, I don't know if this has anything to do with anything, but someone said that they had been getting "pinged" an awful lot lately in another thread...and so I have been checking ZA for the last few days, and I am getting a BUNCH more pings than normal too.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

What is the harddrive for such a small and slow machine? (No offense intended) If the HDD is majorly full it would slow to a crawl as one I had whenever the memory was at it's limits and/or the swapfile was having a tough time finding any space to use. If I remmember right, there was a period in which I saw block trailers behind the cursor/pointer as well.

Adding any firewalls, A/V's if this is the case would only worsen the problem.

Are the Temp, cookie, History and TIF files cleared on a regular basis? Also unchecking show pic/animations may help to a degree if that is tolerable.

(edit):
Oh and Kay,
I have experienced more pings as of late but ESPECIALLY port hits (137 mostly) that do have the tendency to slow my pc slightly (firewall doing it's thing constantly).

[sea69]

seems a consideration would be if the modem is a software (half a modem).

if so, it uses you processor and system RAM in order to function- thus taking away from the little you have to begin with?

;)

[Paul Komski]

Good point Sea - a WinModem wouldn't help the situation, but could one actually cause these symptoms? I'm assuming that the implication is that the CPU is too busy to run the video, but could that make the text disappear for example. I'm just intrigued! :D

I have a 486-50MHz 300Meg with 16RAM running a WinModem on Win95 that browses just fine; though not too fast (after getting updated drivers the connection speeds improved too). Admittedly the cache is kept empty, I don't run many apps simultaneously and have about 30Meg of free space on which Windows manages the memory. Only ever upgraded to IE4 though.

[mjc]

The vast majority of the increase in pings is due to the two latest worms Opasoft and Bugbear...both are looking for open NetBIOS ports, usually 137, so they can be fruitful and multiply.....

[Sylvander]

I'm with ted on this.

A copy of the image information for the web page would be stored in the "Temporary Internet Files" folder and loaded into "memory" and that info would be used to generate the image, but it's gradually being lost until it's refreshed.
Could that be because there's a shortage of RAM and the image is downgraded to the swap file pretty quickly and there's a shortage of HDD space [for the swap file] and Windows [on behalf of other programmes] is being forced to overwrite the memory locations being used for the image? Then when it's refreshed the process starts all over again.
So how much space is there on the HDD?

[Fra]

Kayofcircles, l was out of the office till Wednesday and the problem hasn't occured since. All little frustrating as it could possibly come back again.

Cheers

Fran

[Fra]

Ted and Sylvander, the HD was about 1Gb but only half full when checked. I don't know whether the Temp, cookie, History and TIF files are cleared regularly. I wouldn't think so they are pretty new to getting on-line and wouldn't be familar with those things.

I know the spec of the machine, by today's standards, is very slow but should be OK for browsing. Maybe using an earlier version of IE might help (as in Pauls situation). But it still struck me how the text and icons went fuzzy and then came back OK after hitting the refresh button.

In this day and age AV has to be a must, so a scan may reveal something.

Cheers

Fran

[Paul Komski]

Sylvander Elegant theory :) but can allocated RAM be overwritten in this way? Wouldn't the whole thing just crash or lock-up or produce an error message?

It's an interesting one (though not much help to Fra yet).

Another thought; once rendered, wouldn't the browser's "display" have the same static files in the TIFs for on or off line viewing. We don't know, but would we expect the browser's display to be repainted if it was resized and are other apps losing quality too. It's all a bit puzzling! :p

[kayofcircles]

Fra : One morning, I clicked on Print, and 98 announced "you must have a printer installed to print"..well, duh..but I looked in My Computer, and sure enough..NO printer. Puzzled over that a few minutes..had a printer the day before and used it just fine. Didn't "do" anything to effect printer..so? I got offline, closed everything up, and rebooted puter. Printer "back"..:confused: Hasn't happened again. My point is that maybe your printer problem has fixed itself in some weird "who knows?" way, but if not, you can always ask again..:)

I am not sure what the current degrading of web pages problem is, but if I remember 95 correctly, there are no "cleaning tools" like Disk Clean..right? So, you will need to impress on your friends that they will need to regularly "clean" out the Temp Internet folder, and even watch for Cookies getting out of hand. A "shortcut" that might help on that is go to Tools (in the IE 5 screen)..Internet Options..Advanced tab. Down underneath the Security settings is a line that reads "Empty Temporary Internet folder when browser is closed" and if you have your friends check that..that should solve the cache problem. And kind of check down that Advanced list..with fewer resources, it might be better to uncheck some "play sounds" boxes or similar, especially if they're like me and never even turn on their speakers anyway. I had a lot of "connection" type problems with IE 4 (would get bumped offline, or get the "can't display this page" stuff)..that I have not had with IE 5..so don't recommend going back to 4 unless you're sure that's the problem.

[Fra]

Kayofcircles, l think l have to agree with what you were saying,
your printer problem has fixed itself in some weird "who knows?" way
Wouldn't it be marvellous if all our computer woes were rectified by a reboot............well, we can dream about it.

Good housekeeping won't do my friends PC any harm, especially with the spec he has. It just depends on how "house-proud" he is. ;)

Cheers

Fran

[Sylvander]

PAUL
"can allocated RAM be overwritten in this way"
I believe it can.
I've done a LOT of reading about PC's in the last 6 years and the problem is I don't remember where I read it. It said that when "memory" is in short supply and space gets tight programmes/applications use memory "more aggressively". It may have been in relation to "page faults" where a prog goes to retreive data but meanwhile it has been overwritten by another. Then there's the issue of protected and unprotected memory space.
Is Windows managing the swap file, or is it a [small] fixed size swap file I wonder?
I wonder what would happen if the drive was very fragmented and pieces of the image were scattered all over the drive?

I was a little bothered by the theory myself because afterwards it occurred to me that the image information would be used 70 or 80 times per second [to draw the image]; so surely it would need to be kept in the higher areas like the cache or RAM.
Yet it still seems to me that if the image is gradually degrading then the information which is used to make it must be degrading.
So how could that happen?

I wonder if she should run "dxdiag.exe" and update her "DirectX" drivers?

FRA
"Wouldn't it be marvellous if all our computer woes were rectified by a reboot".
A lot of mine are!
Just recently the little arrows on the desktop shortcut icons had disappeared and all that showed were small blank squares at the bottom left of the icons.
The info needed to make them, which is [I figured] read from the HDD at boot time, had been lost from memory [rather like your problem] so I rebooted and the problem was gone after reboot!
I had the right idea there it seems.
If your problem is the same then image info is gradually being lost from memory.