Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Paranoid? You Bet

You'll think I'm paranoid, but I can't overcome the feeling that Microsoft has stuck their monopolistic fingers into the workings of my beige box again.

I've been using Google Chrome as my default browser for about two years now and love it. It's fast, got a cleaner interface and is arguably more stable than IE. Yesterday it simply stalled and won't reload my default tabs on start-up. That happened early last week, but a quick update to the latest incremental upgrade of Chrome cured the problem

Yesterday, however, that wasn't it.

Naturally I temporarily reverted to Internet Explorer. Seems to work but is still a bit slow. I went through the usual suspects. Shut down and reboot. No help. Check on Chrome update. No help. Shut down modem and router and restart. Not it. Reinstall Chrome. Nope. Remove and reinstall Chrome. Still not doing it.

But IE works a bit better today.

Purged browsing history, cookies, log-ins, passwords, and temp files. Still no help.

This looks like the experience I had four years ago with FireFox. Total satisfaction for a while and then suddenly, failure and a need to return to IE.

Am I being paranoid, or are they really out to get me...and succeeding!

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

MS is one of the dirtiest players in the it world. You might try reverting to a previous system restore point and see what happens. The other thing I would try is to check your windows experience score and see if that has changed in the negative direction. Doing the windows memory diagnostic wouldn't be a bad ides either.

Good Luck

~Leadfoot

nzgarry said...

Get ruthless Mr Rasimus and re-install the operating system!.
Of course backup your personal stuff but pretty well all the rest, such as MS Office etc can be reloaded from cd.
PC's, as much as we love them, are crap consumer electronics. My wife recently expressed her frustration at the lousy performance of her laptop. She re-installed the OS and was rewarded with an immediate performance boost.

kerrys said...

One word - Apple

MagiK said...

Ed, I doubt it is a targeted attack by M$ or they would have hit other browsers too, Firefox has been just hunky dorey with no issues during this time. There were updates to Chrome so I suspect its an issue of your drivers, and Chrome. But it is easy to get paranoid :)

Ed Rasimus said...

Paranoia confirmed! System restore to the last restore point before Chrome problems. Guess what? It was a Windows "critical update". Restored and guess what? Chrome would not load! Reinstalled Chrome and voila! Works again. Now standing by for next critical update attack from MS.

MagiK said...

lol guess M$ and Google aren't getting along these days....luckily Firefox was unaffected by the Critical Update.

M$ updates and patches are always a chore, but contrary to popular belief Windows is NOT the only OS that has issues when patches are released. Working with multiple flavors of UNIX I see Patch issues all the time.

Anonymous said...

I second the previous comment about MS being dirty. They are. In spades!

However, there are other issues at work sometimes too. Rogue Java applets or bad Javascripts can steal cycles. Adobe is notorious for breaking OS with their browser updates for Flash and so forth.

You sound tech savvy Ed. So, maybe you might want to look at both Process Explorer and Process Monitor from the MS website. They give you a great look at what is happening under the hood. Good Luck!

Anonymous said...

When Mr. Gates was in High School he programmed the computer to put him in a math class with 29 girls. He got away with it since the school apparently was afraid it could not find a programmer to replace Bill Gates. If I was the principal I wouldn't have let that happened and history might be different today.

And your welcome with the advice I gave you about system restore.

~Leadfoot