repeated system crashing using win98/firefox2

[mikeb]

Hmmmm, I seem to be having one of my usual problems with Ye Olde 'Puter repeatedly crashing whilst on eFests forums again Yeah, I know it's technically my fault for still using a cr@ppy old 'puter with Win98, Firefox 2, old flash player etc. and all that so nothing much you can do but posted just in case anyone else is having the same prob or, more to the point, knows a temporary fix until the suspect Ad eventually disappears from the rotation ! Since late yesterday or early today, the very best I can get from eFests is a couple of mins browsing before hitting the reset button so it's pretty much completely unusable.

I think it's down to the TFL bicycle Ad TBH although I'm not 100% sure as it's very difficult to see exactly what's going on before everything goes all t*ts up and a hard reset or power-down is the only way out unfortunately. The other likely offender is whatever humongous load of cr@p data is getting DL'd from 247.realmedia.com (or something like that) which may or may not be the same Ad.

It's only happening whilst on eFests that's for sure and it only ever seems to happen when that d@mn TFL bicycle ad is on the screen as well ... which sadly is on almost every page and on every page refresh as well at the mo so you can't even hit refresh when you see it loading and get a sensible Ad in it's place unfortunately.

Why the hell these terminally stupid Ad houses can't produce sensible and realistic Ads that are not only effective but backwards compatible and don't generally (and often quite deliberately no doubt) screw things up is kinda beyond me. Surely they must realise that anyone who gets seriously p*ssed off with a particular Ad for whatever reason is highly unlikely to EVER consider using the product being advertised at any time in the future !!! Virgin media and BT Broadband being 2 prime examples. When their ads for "lightening fast broadband" or whatever totally prevent any other activity on the 'puter whatsoever because (IMHO) they deliberately hang the system until the Ad has run all the way through, then I would seriously doubt whether anyone is ever going to be tempted to sign up for the product in question because a demonstration of "lightening fast" it most certainly isn't It usually takes a dogs age to stutter through some god awful cr@p and totally unnecessary video before allowing you to continue browsing. I hate to think how the fcuk anyone manages to do anything at all these days if they're still stuck on dial-up with the amount of wasted bandwidth due to huge F/O great totally unnecessary and unjustified video Ads together with often humongous sized and very badly produced websites in general. Not everyone has access to shiny new state of the art go faster 'puters with a direct Gigabit connection to the relevant server FFS !!!!!!!

PS: What happened to the possibility of there being a subscription service for an Ad-free (or at least reduced Ads) eFests that was mentioned a while back ? I have an appropriate credit card dead handy and until whatever the 'problem' is finally disappears of it's own accord you could almost name your price no matter what to see incoming do$h

Edited July 1, 2009 by mikeb

[eFestivals]

PS: What happened to the possibility of there being a subscription service for an Ad-free (or at least reduced Ads) eFests that was mentioned a while back ? I have an appropriate credit card dead handy and until whatever the 'problem' is finally disappears of it's own accord you could almost name your price no matter what to see incoming do$h

this'll happen sometime soon - unfortunately, I can't magic extra hours to the week out of thin air.

[timespeedsup]

What you've described has been getting me now for the last couple of days. On both computers.

[ninjatrout]

Hmmmm, I seem to be having one of my usual problems with Ye Olde 'Puter repeatedly crashing whilst on eFests forums again Yeah, I know it's technically my fault for still using a cr@ppy old 'puter with Win98, Firefox 2, old flash player etc.

[mikeb]

Uh, WTF are you using win98? Don't say old PC because there's a large selection of easy to use, even for non-technical folks, Linux solutions out there that would allow you to be up to date with old hardware

Edited July 12, 2009 by mikeb

[Ponyegg]

This issue may be related to the Javascript error issue which has appeared recently covered in /index.php?showtopic=128208">this thread and /index.php?showtopic=128130">thisone.

One reason to move from Win98 is that it is no longer supported by MS but as you say you've got some important apps that will only run on the Win98 stack.

One thing you've probably thought about is to consider running something like VMWare. Sun xVM, MXS Virtual PC etc... That way you could get yourself a nice shiny new machine with oodles of memory etc and then run a virtual instance of Win98 when you need to access that OS. We're developing and environment here to run multiple OS's on one machine for testing purposes. The only downside is that, technically, it can be a bit tricky to set up. Just a thought though.