Does this happen to anyone else?

[Terry Smart]

Hi all

Since installing Windows XP many months ago most of my computer troubles (crashes, hangs etc) stopped...

... until recently that is. Now, when I'm browsing around this site, especially when using the wheel on my mouse to scroll the page up and down, the screen freezes and I have to reboot the computer as it won't respond to anything I do. This only happens when I'm looking around this site, on the forums.

I'm not really expecting to find out why this is happening but it would be interesting to know if this happens to anyone else!

Cheers

Terry

 

[blurk99]

Hi Terry
Have you got the latest service packs from Microsoft?
Things like poorly configured graphics cards can cause these sorts of problems, so can having the standard MS Java console, try downloading and installing the 'proper' version - i think it's from Sun Microsystems or summat

 

[chiba]

I'd vote for it being a video driver problem. Install the latest production version for your card. Have you added anything to your system since your days of stability? Installed anything, even? Games?

 

[Terry Smart]

Hi Guys

Thanks for the feedback so far. My updates are updated and the drivers are also current so I don't think that it's them. Java is also loaded.

I haven't installed anything new lately and don't generally play games on the PC (I use the PS2 for that when I can wrench control away of it from my girlfriend... although it is hers so I can't really complain!).

What I really don't understand is that the computer is on all day, every day and it's only when I'm on the forums that I have problems!

 

[blurk99]

Hi Terry,
The 'PHP' scripting language that is used to build this bulletin board / forum page borrows heavily from Java, C and Perl programming / scripting languages so it's possible that your machine has a configuation glitch with one of these - Java and Perl should be inbuilt into the version of your browser but the C components may be missing / corrupted within Win XP. I have had this happen loads of times, but usually the installation disk can sort it out, or microsoft have a download - i think it's something like the 'Run Time environment' for C that i've had to download.

jim

 

[andrewm]

I may be wrong here and I await to stand corrected but I was under the impression that the PHP scripting language is run on the server only and that it dynamically generates normal HTML pages that are downloaded to the client. From the point of view of the client machine there is no difference between what it receives and a static site. The advantage is in the server being able to generate pages 'on the fly' as the underlying data changes.

Andrew

 

[Chris Knight]

Andrew is correct I think - if you "view source" it's just html. This phpBB forum software is also used by millions of sites and although a malformed HTML page can cause problems I think it most likely that Terry's problem is confined to his machine otherwise there would be more folk complaining.

 

[blurk99]

Hi AndrewM,
Yes, i too think that's how the pages a generated - that's presumably why all of us see different boards depending on which threads we have or haven't read, but the download of the run time environment was recommended by Microsoft support when i had very similar problems with Netscape on a Win 2000 machine, but they then also recommended i download the MDAC stuff aswell, they may have just been covering all options i suppose. Oddly the problem kept resurfacing from time to time, sometimes months apart, but those two updates always seemed to sort it out.

jim

 

[Terry Smart]

Hi again Guys

Thanks very much for all of the replies and the advice. I must be honest that some of it left me behind a bit, I'm a bit of a typical computer user inasmuch as I don't really know how it works, it just does (or sometimes doesn't!)

Strangely enough the problem hasn't repeated itself lately (famous last words) but I reckon it's one of the settings in this machine as no-one else seems to be having real problems with it!

Thanks again

Terry

 

[Charley]

Yes Andrew is correct. PHP and perl (cgi) are run on the server and don't have to be installed on the viewers computer. PHP and Perl generate the page into normal html when you access the file so as far as your computer is concerned it's just viewing another plain html file.