Computer freezes when viewing pages with a lot of photos

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trencheel303

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How much memory do you have? It may be that you do not have enough.
 
if its getting extremely hot then it could be your heatsink is clogged with that grey nasty dust stuff which might be maying the system unstable.

but if its only started happening since updating your graphics drivers on high graphical webpages id say thats too much of a coincidence.. sometimes hardware vendors keep an archive of older drivers, might be worth dropping the version back down a notch.
 
Maybe it's the number of connections to the server?
 
trencheel303 said:
well, both. the PF is 4GB and is housed on its own dedicated partition.
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so its used the entire partition? that might not help, if its trying to write to the page file and it has no space then it will probably fall over..

id make sure your page file is set to system managed/automatic, 4GB is WAAAY too big. on a system with 1GB memory it should be around 1.5GB tops.

what OS are you on? generally its under...

right click computer/my computer, properties, advanced, performance, advanced, virtual memory.

there should be no reason why the pagefile should be manually set.
 
Don't understand having the pagefile set like that but I would think another 1Gb of RAM might work wonders.
 
trencheel303 said:
and that was because I kept the same web browser open for nearly a month straight...
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Thats quite an achievement! Have you performed virus scans, spyware checks etc.

I guess another possibility is that XP is just getting bloated, constantly installing and removing programs can impact the performance of the OS over time, it's not so bad with newer OS's, Vista & Windows 7 but on XP it can be a problem.
 
Do you use Google Chrome by any chance :shrug: as I am sure this was a prob with it on some but not all picture heavy sites. Whichever browser you use try another one and visit the same page again and see what happens.
 
Try reinstalling service pack 2/3 whichever one you have installed, that should help with the stability.
 
A couple of points,
The pagefile, while not appearing to cause issues, is set way wrong, WinXP 32 bit will only address upto 4gb of memeory address's (including video memory) therefore you have a total of 5gb memory space available, it will never be completely used!

Your freezing issue, I'd go with rolling back the driver first as that was the 'thing' that changed.
Next, I suspect you may have a hard drive problem - my thinking is maybe a dodgy block on the pagefile partition, especially if the laptop is not booting everytime.
Look in the BIOS (F10 on boot usually on HP) for anything that says Hard Drive Self Test or DPS, that will test the drive, back anything up first though as I have seen this test push a dodgy drive over the edge.
 
Try clearing your cache and history in firefox.

Tools>Clear Recent History> Everything>Make sure 'Cache' is checked
 
Probably unrelated but I had a problem with everything freezing if I left the computer for a few minutes, or when browsing after I installed Norton Internet Security 2010 (after having too many problems with Zonealarm). This has been fixed with a reformat - first in 18 months and my computer is running so much more smoothly although I have not re-loaded all programmes yet
 
hmm, somehow i don't think we're getting the whole picture here. You have this one issue which you explained originally, but then you say you think the pc is knackered?

As for it being cheap HP junk, maybe, but HP just assemble pc's with components made by the same people who make for Dell, Apple, etc, etc. The only thing HP-customised might be the OS.

Firstly, do as Neil G suggests, roll back to your previous driver... just for piece of mind.

Then, you will need to start fault finding, think about things testing the ram (windows memory diagnostics) thats a good starting point
 
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