Computer General Discussion Thread

[Cisairse]

Hi all. I'm experiencing some peculiar computer trouble.

It began quite recently - either the latest iTunes update, or when Microsoft started rolling out "ads" about its upcoming major Windows 10 patch, or whatever it is.
But as of recent, my laptop, and Chrome in particular, have become very poor performing.
Chrome has become quite unresponsive, even with relatively few (by my standards) tabs in use. Memory use is extremely high, topping 3GB of the 3.7GB RAM capacity on board, when watching videos on say Youtube. It's now become common for videos to stutter constantly (audio unaffected) and almost any tab to become "unresponsive" for no evident reason. It eventually unsticks, but it never used to really stick in the first place.
I used to be able to pretty much count up all the memory uses in the Task Manager and say "yeah, that sounds about right" but I feel I'm no longer able to make it add up. There's just a lot of RAM in use, all the time.

The laptop also runs very hot now. It used to idle at maybe 50-52 degrees for basically anything, even browsing and forum posting while Youtube runds endlessly in the background. Now, one of the two cores routinely pushes 60-65 degrees when Youtube or any other video service is playing. This core is perpetually 5-10 degrees above the other for whatever reason.

Allegedly, all my drivers are up to date, my Windows is up to date, my browser is up to date, my OS and all my programmes are legit versions, I don't know what's happened to it.
I've been considering replacing one of its 2x2GB RAM chips with a 4GB chip to give the laptop nigh 6GB of RAM to work with. Not because it'd really be all that useful, but it'd just give it a lot more room when operating normally, instead of perpetually topping out its RAM.

Aside from that, there's only two things I've not tried - 1) cracking open the case to clean the fan or whatever - the fan is buried within the case proper on Acers, and I'd need to fully disassemble the machine. I'd rather save that for whether or not I make a decision on extra RAM chips.
2) reinstall the OS. This is my most straightforward action I feel I can take, but I'd need to do a lot of electronic housekeeping first moving backups around.

Any ideas?
Acer Aspire 5742, 4GB RAM, Windows 10, whatever latest version of Chrome is.

Just sounds to me like something's running in the background that doesn't want you to know it is.

My guess? Some sort of Windows update tool that's hiding itself from you. Have you been monitoring hard drive access alongside temperature?

Beyond that, if you're trying to do the RAM calculus make sure you're looking at services too. I once had a problem where any game I played on my laptop would suffer severe slowdowns, even ones that should be really easy for the 840M and i7 to handle such as Democracy 3 or Game Dev Tycoon. The problem? Google Drive's Update Service kept maxing out one of my cores every time my desktop wasn't in focus because apparently it assumed that meant the computer was idle and started a full backup of my Drive. svchost.exe was maxing out the CPU but it would drop back down every time I opened Task Manager to check.

Don't just reinstall quite yet, because if it's an official Windows thing it might not even fix the problem. Microsoft is pretty bad nowadays at the whole "don't run arbitrary programs on people's computers without asking them or figuring out if it's a decent time" thing. It might be trying to download the new update and your laptop can't handle both a constant HDD writing and whatever else you're doing with it.

Is it worth ditching Windows in favor of Linux/Ubuntu? I maninly use my PC for gaming and school, and I hear Windows is better for that, though.

If you do switch to Linux, stay far away from Ubuntu.

As for whether switching to Linux is the right thing, well...I feel like if you have to ask the answer is probably no. Linux is a wonderful operating system and is much better at Windows for many, many things, but there are still a lot of things you can't do on Linux that you can on Windows. Gaming is one of those. It's getting better and a lot of Steam games work on Linux now but still the vast majority don't. And then there's stuff like Adobe that just doesn't exist at all on Linux.

If you have the capacity, dual-booting is a good compromise.

Well, I play Steam games almost exclusively now.

I don't think it really matters all that much, but I've become obsessed with customization of OS and browsers.

Anything produced by Valve, or that uses the Source engine, should run on Linux with little to no issue (unless it's TF2). I remember that I was able to play about 2/3 of my Steam library without having to use WINE or PlayOnLinux.

As stated above, Linux operating systems will suffice for school tasks.

About 35% of my library is available on linux.

It's worth noting that there's actually a couple games that work better on Linux through Wine than natively on Windows for me. Notably, Darkest Hour crashes on startup on newer Windows AMD drivers but works just fine in PlayOnLinux.

For almost anything not related to gaming or video editing, Linux is superior to Windows. And also free.

The external drive is 1TB.

Also, Chrome performance has dipped to the point where "open in new tab" fails to work. A new tab will be created, but the page will not display, just a blank tab with the background colour of the last tab visited displayed.
The page still loads behind this, since repeatedly reloading on an "unread posts" link will actually shuffle pages.

The tab must be closed and a new tab created for that url to be loaded.

Have you attempted to reinstall Chrome?
While this is sounding more and more like a hardware issue I feel like either that or attempting to use a different browser such as Firefox may reveal any more elusive aspects of the issue.

Apple should die. Vendor lock in policies, overpriced hardware. Needing my credit card details when trying to download a free tool (ha!).

I think that Apple is necessary in the hardware side. Say what you will about their software, but Macbook Pros feel amazing to use, and I have a feeling that without them there wouldn't be any laptops on the market that aren't just gray plastic.

That being said their operating system is absolute dogshit made for people who think Beats sound good. I wouldn't mind using an MBP 15" with Arch Linux or Windows 10. Then again that's just a Dell XPS 15, so I'll probably just get that at some point in the future when (if) my Thinkpad dies.

[Imperializt Russia]

An OS reinstall did actually fix most of the issues I was having. After reinstalling, that windows update became available and has installed and all seems to be well.

I have noticed pretty constant hard drive use, for no discernible reason.
Windows update has always annoyed the shit out of me, I do not understand how it needs so much CPU resources to download that slowly.

[Corentian Labour Battalions]

My computer is slow. How do I fix it?

[Imperializt Russia]

My computer is slow. How do I fix it?

There are a lot of possible solutions.

As long as you have a valid installation disk and the product key, you could reinstall your operating system, as I did above. This lets you start your computer fresh, which should basically wipe it of anything bloated or nasty. Always backup data before attempting.
And only try it if everything else is not helping.

You could have a virus or malware.
Many products are available; personally, I operate Avast!, MalwareBytes and SuperAntiSpyware together.
I recommend SAS the most, since it makes the most difference. On my laptop, it basically deletes cookies considered "adware", which can seriously slow browser performance.

You could be harbouring a lot of cached material - especially if you watch a lot of YouTube.
For this, I would recommend downloading and scanning your computer using CCleaner.
After a few days, I can easily rack up 300-600MB just in the cache of Google Chrome. It's heavily customisable.
My personal settings for Chrome in CCleaner are to delete the browser history, download history and locations and internet cache, while leaving Session and Cookies intact (and deleting cookies infrequently).

Or, very simply, your hard drive could be very full. Try deleting stuff you have no need for, and try defragmenting the disk.
While a hard drive operates, bits of "fragments" of files can move around the disk. This means when the hard drive tries to load a file, it's having to search all the way across the disk to find these fragments, slowing its performance and computer performance in general.

I use Auslogics Disk Defrag for this, but Windows does feature a disk defrag tool already.

[Minoa]

To add to the above, most modern browsers can block third party cookies, which basically limits the advertisers’ cookies by a lot. For the stubborn ones, most modern browsers can blacklist cookies by domain. By default, all my cookies are session-only. Only the ones that I need are allowed to be persistent.

[Salandriagado]

My computer is slow. How do I fix it?

There are a lot of possible solutions.

As long as you have a valid installation disk and the product key, you could reinstall your operating system, as I did above. This lets you start your computer fresh, which should basically wipe it of anything bloated or nasty. Always backup data before attempting.
And only try it if everything else is not helping.

You could have a virus or malware.
Many products are available; personally, I operate Avast!, MalwareBytes and SuperAntiSpyware together.
I recommend SAS the most, since it makes the most difference. On my laptop, it basically deletes cookies considered "adware", which can seriously slow browser performance.

You could be harbouring a lot of cached material - especially if you watch a lot of YouTube.
For this, I would recommend downloading and scanning your computer using CCleaner.
After a few days, I can easily rack up 300-600MB just in the cache of Google Chrome. It's heavily customisable.
My personal settings for Chrome in CCleaner are to delete the browser history, download history and locations and internet cache, while leaving Session and Cookies intact (and deleting cookies infrequently).

Or, very simply, your hard drive could be very full. Try deleting stuff you have no need for, and try defragmenting the disk.
While a hard drive operates, bits of "fragments" of files can move around the disk. This means when the hard drive tries to load a file, it's having to search all the way across the disk to find these fragments, slowing its performance and computer performance in general.

I use Auslogics Disk Defrag for this, but Windows does feature a disk defrag tool already.

For what it's worth, you don't actually need the install disk: you can download the install files from Microsoft's website.

[Soldati Senza Confini]

There are a lot of possible solutions.

As long as you have a valid installation disk and the product key, you could reinstall your operating system, as I did above. This lets you start your computer fresh, which should basically wipe it of anything bloated or nasty. Always backup data before attempting.
And only try it if everything else is not helping.

You could have a virus or malware.
Many products are available; personally, I operate Avast!, MalwareBytes and SuperAntiSpyware together.
I recommend SAS the most, since it makes the most difference. On my laptop, it basically deletes cookies considered "adware", which can seriously slow browser performance.

You could be harbouring a lot of cached material - especially if you watch a lot of YouTube.
For this, I would recommend downloading and scanning your computer using CCleaner.
After a few days, I can easily rack up 300-600MB just in the cache of Google Chrome. It's heavily customisable.
My personal settings for Chrome in CCleaner are to delete the browser history, download history and locations and internet cache, while leaving Session and Cookies intact (and deleting cookies infrequently).

Or, very simply, your hard drive could be very full. Try deleting stuff you have no need for, and try defragmenting the disk.
While a hard drive operates, bits of "fragments" of files can move around the disk. This means when the hard drive tries to load a file, it's having to search all the way across the disk to find these fragments, slowing its performance and computer performance in general.

I use Auslogics Disk Defrag for this, but Windows does feature a disk defrag tool already.

For what it's worth, you don't actually need the install disk: you can download the install files from Microsoft's website.

Only for the latest Windows versions.

Anything lower than 8/8.1 they tend not to have install files.

[Cisairse]

There are a lot of possible solutions.

As long as you have a valid installation disk and the product key, you could reinstall your operating system, as I did above. This lets you start your computer fresh, which should basically wipe it of anything bloated or nasty. Always backup data before attempting.
And only try it if everything else is not helping.

You could have a virus or malware.
Many products are available; personally, I operate Avast!, MalwareBytes and SuperAntiSpyware together.
I recommend SAS the most, since it makes the most difference. On my laptop, it basically deletes cookies considered "adware", which can seriously slow browser performance.

You could be harbouring a lot of cached material - especially if you watch a lot of YouTube.
For this, I would recommend downloading and scanning your computer using CCleaner.
After a few days, I can easily rack up 300-600MB just in the cache of Google Chrome. It's heavily customisable.
My personal settings for Chrome in CCleaner are to delete the browser history, download history and locations and internet cache, while leaving Session and Cookies intact (and deleting cookies infrequently).

Or, very simply, your hard drive could be very full. Try deleting stuff you have no need for, and try defragmenting the disk.
While a hard drive operates, bits of "fragments" of files can move around the disk. This means when the hard drive tries to load a file, it's having to search all the way across the disk to find these fragments, slowing its performance and computer performance in general.

I use Auslogics Disk Defrag for this, but Windows does feature a disk defrag tool already.

For what it's worth, you don't actually need the install disk: you can download the install files from Microsoft's website.

Not for Windows 7 or prior. The Digital River dried up a long time ago.

[Nordengrund]

Anyone here good with HTML?

I'm trying to design a personal website to use for contacting me and for business, but I'm trying to make it look more visually appealing.

[Salandriagado]

Anyone here good with HTML?

I'm trying to design a personal website to use for contacting me and for business, but I'm trying to make it look more visually appealing.

Don't try to use HTML for visual design. HTML is for structure. Use something that actually works for the visual design.

[Soldati Senza Confini]

Anyone here good with HTML?

I'm trying to design a personal website to use for contacting me and for business, but I'm trying to make it look more visually appealing.

I mean I'm okay with HTML, but visual design should go in your CSS document, not your HTML code if you can.

Unless by HTML you mean HTML5, which I have not gotten up to par yet, and even then you still need CSS3 and JavaScript to get it all well.

[Nordengrund]

I don't know CSS, nor what software you would use for that. I know you can use Notepad for HTML, but I plan to get Expression Web once I have get the more important payments out of the way, first.

[Salandriagado]

I don't know CSS, nor what software you would use for that. I know you can use Notepad for HTML, but I plan to get Expression Web once I have get the more important payments out of the way, first.

Literally every kind of programming or scripting can be done in notepad, or any other text editor.

Use a free editor: Notepad++ is my preference, and there are many other excellent options available.

Learn CSS.

[Soldati Senza Confini]

I don't know CSS, nor what software you would use for that. I know you can use Notepad for HTML, but I plan to get Expression Web once I have get the more important payments out of the way, first.

CSS can be used literally in every notepad or another text editor like Salandriagado said.

However, a WYSIWYG web editor like Adobe Dreamweaver also works to see what you're doing, but you need to understand CSS to do anything in the first place.

[Nordengrund]

So will I need to use a separate document for CSS, or can I use it alongside HTML in the same document?

[Soldati Senza Confini]

So will I need to use a separate document for CSS, or can I use it alongside HTML in the same document?

You can do either.

Nesting CSS in the HTML document can be confusing the longer your code gets tho.

[Nordengrund]

So will I need to use a separate document for CSS, or can I use it alongside HTML in the same document?

You can do either.

Nesting CSS in the HTML document can be confusing the longer your code gets tho.

I tried my hand at it and the coding itself seems fairly easy, but it's irritating me when it comes to actually displaying it when I try to link it to an HTML document.

Edit: Nevermind. Figured it out.

[Nordengrund]

Will I need to back up my files one Windows 10 if I switch from BIOS to UEFI?

I'm trying to start up Linux Mint which I have saved to a USB, and I can't seem to activate it using BIOS.

[Soldati Senza Confini]

Will I need to back up my files one Windows 10 if I switch from BIOS to UEFI?

I'm trying to start up Linux Mint which I have saved to a USB, and I can't seem to activate it using BIOS.

No, what happens when you switch from UEFI to BIOS or vice versa is that your computer can't access the data on a drive formatted under one of the modes that you don't have active.

That's not the same as losing your data, so you don't need to go through that.

[Nordengrund]

Will I need to back up my files one Windows 10 if I switch from BIOS to UEFI?

I'm trying to start up Linux Mint which I have saved to a USB, and I can't seem to activate it using BIOS.

No, what happens when you switch from UEFI to BIOS or vice versa is that your computer can't access the data on a drive formatted under one of the modes that you don't have active.

That's not the same as losing your data, so you don't need to go through that.

What kind of data would that be?

[Soldati Senza Confini]

No, what happens when you switch from UEFI to BIOS or vice versa is that your computer can't access the data on a drive formatted under one of the modes that you don't have active.

That's not the same as losing your data, so you don't need to go through that.

What kind of data would that be?

Your Windows installation.

What I mean as "can't access data" is that the BIOS doesn't recognize the bootloader under UEFI if you formatted and installed Windows in Legacy mode.

But that doesn't mean you can't access the data once it is loaded, it simply won't start the systems that are not UEFI under UEFI mode.

[Nordengrund]

What kind of data would that be?

Your Windows installation.

What I mean as "can't access data" is that the BIOS doesn't recognize the bootloader under UEFI if you formatted and installed Windows in Legacy mode.

But that doesn't mean you can't access the data once it is loaded, it simply won't start the systems that are not UEFI under UEFI mode.

So if I switch, all of my files and most of my programs will still be there?

[Cisairse]

Your Windows installation.

What I mean as "can't access data" is that the BIOS doesn't recognize the bootloader under UEFI if you formatted and installed Windows in Legacy mode.

But that doesn't mean you can't access the data once it is loaded, it simply won't start the systems that are not UEFI under UEFI mode.

So if I switch, all of my files and most of my programs will still be there?

You're missing the point.

Yes the files and programs will still be there.

No you won't be able to get to them because your system won't boot.

[The Corparation]

For what it's worth, you don't actually need the install disk: you can download the install files from Microsoft's website.

Not for Windows 7 or prior. The Digital River dried up a long time ago.

They don't have public download links but if you use the support chat on their website they'll give you a download link to an .iso for any version you want. You don't even need to give them a key.

[Yes Im Biop]

Holy hell this thread is still going

I'm about to get a new job that pays something like 4x what i am making now, I am planning to get a new ASUS RoG Gaming laptop and later build a AMD rig (Cause i am still poor) Any suggestions on ether of those, and no, DOn't get a gaming Laptop, is not an option.