Tech and life

I always try to post about sorting out anything unusual happening on my PC in the hope that it may help someone else with the same problem.

I had a strange thing happen with Google Chrome browser this morning. I have Chrome set to open five tabs when it launches but none would open and I just got one tab of a blank page. When I opened Options (under the spanner icon), in the Basics menu, under On Startup , everything seemed fine. Open the following pages was checked and the correct 5 URLs were listed there to open on start up. So I closed Chrome, reopened it and the same thing happened. Chrome seemed to be ignoring the instruction to open 5 tabs and for some reason was just opening a blank home page.

So I played around with a few things and got nowhere until I opened task manager (Ctrl-Shift-Esc) and saw that even when Chrome was closed, a bunch of Chrome processes were still running under the Processes tab! It seemed that, although I’d closed Chrome, it was still running.

So I opened Chrome again and went to the Options menu as before to see if a preference setting was causing this. Sure enough, when I looked at the Under the Hood menu, the option at the bottom of that page called Background Apps was checked allowing background apps to keep running when Google Chrome was closed. Once I unchecked this and restarted Chrome, everything was back to normal and my usual 5 tabs opened without a hitch.

So how did that box get checked? Well, it wasn’t me. However I had run CCEnhancer/CCleaner just before opening Chrome and this may have somehow reset the preferences. Anyway I know what to do if it happens again. Hope this helps in troubleshooting this Chrome problem.

A few weeks ago, there was a flurry of posts about the Chrome extension Super Google Reader which lets you read RSS feeds in full form in Google Reader. Some blogs only give truncated feeds and you have to visit their website for the full post so I thought I’d give it a try. Once I had reopened Reader, I had access to full RSS feeds using the Readable tab which Super Google Reader had added at the top of the posts as shown below.

But I noticed that Google Reader had slowed down considerably after I enabled that extension. Refresh, Mark All as Read and changing folders were all unacceptably slow so I ran through my slow Reader checklist which I’ve already posted just to ensure that the Google servers weren’t at fault. They weren’t. When I disabled Super Google Reader, speed was back to normal.

So if you’re experiencing Google Reader to be slow and you’re using Super Google Reader, try  disabling the extension and see if that helps.

On 4th and 5th May, I found Google Reader to be suddenly significantly slower than usual in Marking all feeds as read and opening new folders of feeds. I use Chrome browser. Of course the first thing that crosses your mind is what have I done? Is it my fault? Have I done anything or added anything new (eg browser extensions) which may have slowed it down? I know that buggy extensions can cause slow-downs and I’ve blogged about this before.  I hadn’t installed any new software or any new browser extensions on my desktop PC and none had been updated. So I loaded Google Reader in Firefox – still slow. Okay, so I booted up my Acer Aspire netbook running Ubuntu Netbook Edition and Chromium browser – Reader still painfully slow. All other sites including GMail seemed to be okay, so the problem seemed to lie not with me but with Google’s servers. How could I double check?

First port of call, the official Google Reader blog – but no mention of anything there. So then I turned to Twitter and searched for “Google Reader” slow. I counted about 18 tweets on 4th May reporting something along the lines of Google Reader is painfully slow for me today. Most seemed to indicate a recent slow down and weren’t rants about Reader being generally slow.

So that seemed to confirm it. Just sit tight and put up with it and see how things are tomorrow before taking more drastic action like changing feed reader. Sure enough, things were much better the next day. Running the same search on Twitter as before, I found only 2 relevant tweets on 5th May and none on the 6th. So the ‘Twitterverse’ seems to be a really good mirror of slow online services.

So that’s my quick diagnostic on a slow online service. Just a pity that the official Google Reader blog didn’t take the time to alert us of the temporary problem.

Is there anything else I might have tried? Have you any tips on troubleshooting a slow online service? Drop a comment below.

If your Date Modified information in your file manager only shows day and month and not year, there’s a quick fix to get the year back. This seems to affect Windows Explorer, the file manager I use xplorer² and also the date display in my email client Eudora. It may also affect MS Outlook but I can’t confirm this as I don’t use it.

You won’t find a fix in the Options for these programs as they all pull the date information from the Date and Time format settings for your PC. In Windows 7, you’ll have to change the Short Date display to show the year and this will be then used in the other programs. It must have been modified by someone in the past to show only day and month. You can modify  the Short Date format by going to the Start button, Control Panel, Region and Language and on the Format tab, change the Short Date to include the year.

You can set up the Short Date display just as you want it by going to the Additional settings button shown on the image above. Once you apply it, that date format including the year will show up in your date information in your file manager.

Does your PC shut down for no apparent reason, then shut down again when you reboot? Is your machine becoming increasingly sluggish or are you experiencing unresponsive programs? There could be a number of causes but there’s one pretty simple procedure you can try and eliminate as the cause before you have to resort to a PC repair tech. Your machine may be overheating. This can be fatal for your CPU and your hard drive and can lead to an expensive repair and possible data loss so it needs to be tackled as soon as possible, or better still prevented. Simply open the PC case and see if there’s a thick layer of dust over all the components. This could be the cause of overheating and subsequent shutdowns as dust acts like a kind of blanket insulating all the electrics and preventing heat from escaping. If you have pets or a smoker in the house, or you live in a dusty environment, the likelihood of dust accumulation in your PC increases.

Okay, so you haven’t opened your PC case before… don’t panic it’s not too difficult. In fact, there’s literally thousands of guides online so I’ll just point out a couple of tips to guide you on your way. Google opening a PC case for lots more help in getting inside your machine.

First check your manual to ensure you’re not voiding your warranty by opening the case. Then it’s up to you whether you proceed.

Next if you haven’t done this before, doubtless there’s a horrendous clutter of cables going into the back of your PC. Switch off and unplug the PC. Take a photo of all the cabling with your digital camera to help you reconnect everything afterwards. You could also stick coloured labels on the cables and corresponding coloured dots on where they go on the back of the PC. Disconnect all the cables.

Put your PC box up on a table with the back facing you. To open and check for dust, you only really need remove one side of the case. Generally it’s the right side panel you have to remove to see everything inside. Check your manual to see how the panel comes off. Either there’s a couple of screws at the back holding it in place or it may be a screwless case with a lever possibly at the top middle of the side and which unclips to open the side panel.

Once you’ve opened it and if you’ve found a thick layer of dust over everything, you can remove the left side panel. Now you’ll need to get a can of compressed air from a local supplier and a face filter if you wish. To avoid getting dust everywhere, take the PC out to your back yard (obviously if it’s not raining) and carefully blow the air over the components. Don’t do this in the house! Don’t hold the compressed can too close to the components and be careful you don’t get showered in dust. Get upwind if it’s breezy outside.

Once you’ve blown the dust off all the components, you can brush any remaining lodged dust out with a soft clean artists brush. Then replace the side panels again on the table and finally plug all the cables back in again and reconnect to the power.

Reboot and see if the shutdown problem is resolved. If not then at least you’ve eliminated dust as the shutdown problem and you won’t have to pay a repair tech for that when he goes on to diagnose the problem.

If dust build-up was the problem, then obviously you’re going to have to repeat this procedure on a regular basis. Have a check again after say 3 months and see how things are.

Monitoring the temperature inside your PC

If you’ve opened up your PC and established that dust build-up is a real problem where you live, it would be well worth installing a temperature monitoring program to keep a constant check on the conditions inside your machine. One free program worth considering is SpeedFan. Among other things, this monitors the temperature of the CPU, the hard drive and the ambient temperature inside the computer.

It can be set to run on computer startup and can sound an alarm when preset temperatures are exceeded. SpeedFan also monitors the speed of your fans. Fans are obviously important in dissipating heat build-up in you PC. A build-up of dust can clog the fans so it’s worth monitoring they’re not slowing down. And obviously if some fans aren’t working at all and there’s no dust, you’ve probably found your overheating problem.

I’m very lucky that dust build-up in PCs isn’t a serious problem where I live in Scotland but listening to the Podnutz Daily computer repair podcast, it’s clearly a problem in many parts of the US and doubtless other parts of the world as well.

Have you experienced PC overheating? Any tips for us or stories? Drop a comment below.

Image credit: eurleif

In the first part of this two-part series, I looked at some basic precautions that would be really worthwhile implementing in preparation for a major PC problem. Here’s some advanced precautions aimed at those who want to roll their sleeves up and try and sort out the problem themselves. Bear in mind that this is written by a non-PC repair specialist but I hope it gives a reasonable round-up of suggestions at a more advanced level.

Don’t forget the utilities you already have on your PC. When trouble strikes, it’s easy to forget what’s already in place on your PC. Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 all have a built-in Event Viewer for viewing event logs. This may help to identify your problem. Here’s a good overview of Event Viewer. Vista and Windows 7 also have a Reliability Monitor and here’s a post about that on How-to Geek.

Turn off automatic reboot so you can read ‘Blue Screen’ (BSOD) error messages. When Windows XP crashes with a Blue Screen it will automatically reboot, often too fast for you to read any error message. Turn this off now to avoid automatic reboots when you have problems. Here’s how to turn it off in XP so you can read the error messages and here’s the Vista instructions.

Bookmark Windows error messages. So you don’t have to go hunting around when you have a problem. Here’s a site for searching for error messages.

Bookmark Windows stop messages. Have a look here or search stop codes here.

Print out beep codes for your BIOS. In Part 1, I discussed how to access your BIOS. Make a note of your BIOS manufacturer and print out a list of beep codes for your BIOS. As with the earlier info you gathered on your system, put this in your folder in case you can’t access the internet when you need this info. Or put Beep Code Viewer on your USB stick.

Load up your USB stick with portable repair tools. Get a suite of portable repair apps on your USB drive, just in case. Here’s a ready-made Portable Repair Utility Kit with a whole bunch of great repair apps to give you a head start. Currently, it’s a two-part download of 102MB and 77MB so may take a little time to download on your system. And for good measure here’s another selection from TechRadar. Technibble is a great resource for PC repair technicians and they have been highlighting a repair tool each week for a couple of years now. Beef up your repair kit even further with a selection of these on your thumb drive. For example, BlueScreenView for analysing what caused a ‘Blue Screen of Death’ crash. I’ve set up a Google search here to list the repair tools recommended on Technibble.

Tool up with some rescue CDs. In the first part, we talked about having a Linux rescue disk on hand in case of emergency. Knoppix is another good Linux rescue disk for disaster recovery. Here’s a post on Computer first aid using Knoppix.  The Ultimate Boot CD is also worth getting hold of. Here’s a quick tutorial on UBCD. Podnutz have released an audio podcast on UBCD for Windows and Technibble have a great video showing some uses for UBCD: Recovering Windows from Common Errors that Prevent it From Booting.

Flowcharts for PC repair. There are flowcharts at Foner Books and Boing Boing for PC repair. Print them out and put them in your folder ahead of any trouble.

Save time in a reinstall after a disaster by slipstreaming OS updates and service packs into an updated install disk. Use nLite (for Windows XP) or vLite (Windows Vista) to create a customised Windows install disk before disaster strikes.

Invest in a spare power supply unit and RAM. If you don’t have access to a backup laptop or PC and you rely heavily on one machine, you might do well to invest in a backup power supply unit (PSU) and memory (RAM) for peace of mind. If you run into boot problems, Memtest86 will check out your PC memory and you can have new sticks installed straight away if this is the cause of your problem. Get a PSU with the same (or better) specs as your currently installed one so that if your PC suddenly dies (and replacing memory doesn’t help), then fit the new PSU. Okay, Sod’s law, it may be a motherboard failure but hopefully not, and your spare hardware may have done the trick. If not perhaps later when you do buy a new PC, you can replace the hardware in your old machine at some stage with the new PSU and RAM to extend its life as a backup machine.

Listen to some PC repair podcasts. If all this had whetted you appetite for PC diagnostics and repair, I can highly recommend the archive of Podnutz Daily PC repair podcasts. A fascinating insight into the detective work involved in PC hardware troubleshooting, virus/spyware removal and life in a PC repair shop.

Further reading

The Complete PC Recovery Toolkit

Expert guide to preventing PC disasters

How to fix Windows 7 when it fails to boot

If I’ve missed anything important in these two posts, please drop a comment below. What steps do you take to prepare for a PC disaster?

Some tips on preparing for a PC disaster is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

Image credit: herzogbr

There may be trouble ahead. Sooner or later your PC or laptop may die and if you rely on it to earn a living you could be in some immediate trouble. If you have a second PC or laptop with all your essential apps and your data is safely backed up regularly, this won’t be too much of an urgent problem but if you rely on that one PC to bring in the bacon, then this post is aimed at you. So what happens one day when you boot your machine and nothing happens, or you’re working away and suddenly it just stops, no LEDs lit, no hard disk spinning, no fans, nothing. Or your hard disk suddenly starts making an ominous clicking sound. Or you open that dodgy email attachment and realise instantly that you’ve done the wrong thing. What would you do? Have you thought about it? Would you panic, or have you anything in place to help you out of this potential PC disaster.

Obviously, depending on your computer experience and your willingness to roll up your sleeves and sort it out, you may be able to recover your PC on your own. But if it’s your only machine you’re still going to lose some time and you mightn’t have that. So what should you do so you’re best prepared for this type of PC emergency? Let me say straight off, I’m not a PC repair guy so I’m not an expert on PC troubleshooting and recovery but I’ve read around enough to know the precautions you should take – just in case disaster strikes.

I’m going to tackle this subject in two parts. This first post is for those who don’t really want to open up their PC and change a hard drive or power supply, but who want to have everything at hand so they can be back up and running as quickly as possible. For brevity, I’m not going to go into the ins and outs of each aspect. There’s enough out there on the internet that I’d just be duplicating stuff. No, it’s going to be essentially just a quick checklist but I’ll try and point you in the direction of some good posts to help you on your way. And it’s a bit belt and braces -  you won’t have to do everything on the list. You’ll need an old fashioned folder, notepad or notebook for some of the notes you’ll need in an emergency – you obviously mightn’t be able to refer to notes on your PC! A couple of screwdrivers would be useful and a digital camera. And you’ll need a safe place for rescue CDs/DVDs.

Backup your system now

Backup your data now – Yes, yes you’ve heard it all before probably until you’re sick of hearing it but it’s simply the single most important thing you can do to prepare for a PC disaster. Backup your data to an external drive, and/or to the cloud. There are lots of free and paid imaging tools out there to do the job including the free Easeus Todo Backup and Macrium Reflect, and the paid Acronis True Image. Windows 7 also has a good backup facility to image to an external hard drive. Here’s a good article on Windows 7 backup. You could even backup your data to say a 16GB USB stick and an external hard drive for good measure. It’s always a good idea to try and keep one backup drive off site – just in case. There are lots of paid and free online backup services but if you do choose one make sure your data is encrypted there for security.

Better still, clone your hard drive – this is essentially making a mirror image of your hard disk onto a new replacement drive and backing up your data to it regularly. I’ve blogged about it before in my post about Preventing a hard disk disaster. In my opinion, this is the ultimate way  to achieve peace of mind knowing that if your hard drive dies, you (or someone capable) can replace the old drive and be up and running again in no time with an exact copy of your old drive. Easeus Todo Backup or Acronis True Image will also clone your drive for you.

Backup your drivers. It’s always a good idea to backup your drivers just in case some day you get a missing device driver warning or you do a driver update which doesn’t work out. Here’s an article on backing up and restoring drivers with DriverMax. You can restore individual drivers from DriverMax.

Backup all your browser bookmarks to the cloud using XMarks. In the event you have to reinstall your browser after a PC disaster, all your precious bookmarks can be safely restored.

Safely store all your passwords in a secure password manager such as LastPass. Don’t rely on your browser to store your passwords. If you ever have to reinstall your browser after PC meltdown, all you’ll have to remember is your LastPass master password to access all the others. Oh, and don’t use dictionary words as passwords. Use mixtures of letters, numbers and symbols if possible. Here’s a great tip from Lifehacker: Shift your fingers one key to the right for easy-to-remember but awesome passwords.

If you have one, make sure your second machine is up to date and ready to take over. If you’re lucky enough to have a second PC or laptop, make sure that it’s always ready to take over with all software you need already installed and data synced to it with, for example, DropBox.

General disaster precautions

Make sure system restore is turned on and is making regular restore points just in case you have to roll back your system files in the event of a malware attack. Here’s a post on Using system restore to recover your Windows 7 computer.

Know the key to press to access the BIOS when booting. You may need to access the BIOS to set your PC’s boot order. Your PC should be set to boot first from a DVD if this is inserted when booting. Try booting with your Windows DVD in place. If it doesn’t boot from the DVD you will have to go into the BIOS to change the boot order. Unfortunately, PC and laptop manufacturers use different keys to access the BIOS. Here’s a good guide at Tech Geek and More. Make a note of this key in your folder.

Know the key to press to boot into Safe Mode. When you boot into Safe Mode the operating system only loads the minimum software that is required for the operating system to work. Often the PC will boot into Safe Mode when normal mode is impossible. Generally it’s the F8 key for Windows systems but here’s a great guide at Bleeping Computer. Make a note of this key in your folder.

Make a Windows Recovery Disk. Here’s some instructions for making a Windows 7 recovery disk. If Windows won’t boot, this may help you to repair your Windows install. It’s obviously important to do this before you run into problems because you can’t burn a rescue disk or Live CD if your PC won’t boot!

Make a Linux rescue disk. If your system won’t boot into Windows, and you can’t find your Windows install disk (and you haven’t made recovery disks) and you haven’t backed up your data, you may be able to access your drive and data by booting up with a Linux disk in your DVD drive. As before, make the Linux rescue disk before you run into problems. There are lots of helpful posts out there but here’s a good one on backing up data from a computer that won’t boot. And here’s a great one from Lifehacker on using a thumb drive to recover your system.

Make a note of where you’ve stored your Windows install disk and all your rescue and recovery disks in your folder and a PC organizer like OneNote (if you have MS Office) or Evernote.

Take a photo of the back of your PC in case you ever have to open it or take it to a repair shop. You may need to reconnect everything again afterwards and a photo is a great way to capture the layout of all the cables. Again, store it in Evernote and your folder.

Label your cables and the back of your PC to make it easier to reconnect them.

Find a screwdriver which opens the back of your PC – you may have to reseat/replace memory sticks or reseat your video card if your PC won’t boot.

Clean out dust to avoid future overheating. Now you have a photo of the back of the PC and you can open it up, if any dust has built up around the fans, etc, clean it out using a can of compressed air. Dust can clog up your fans and reduce air circulation in your box leading to overheating, so hopefully this will ward off any future overheating problems which can stop a PC from booting.

Make an inventory of your PC’s hardware and software. If you do have to do a reinstall it’s nice to have an inventory of your system before disaster strikes. Run SIW or LookInMyPC for a complete PC audit including hardware specs, installed software, licence info and Windows product key; print out to your folder. Here’s some info on LookInMyPC.

Be prepared to recover accidentally deleted files. Install Recuva for file recovery.

Check your hard drive for possible problems with CrystalDiskInfo or SeaTools.

Monitor the temperature inside your box. Get advanced warning if your machine is running hot with HWMonitor.

PC security

Install a good security package. I’ve used AVG Free for years but switched to Microsoft Security Essentials when I upgraded to Windows 7. Looks like they’ve finally produced a top notch security package to protect their OS. If you want an extra level of security then install ThreatFire. You really shouldn’t have to pay for a good security package.

Keep software up to date: Install JavRa to keep Java up to date; Install and run Secunia to patch vulnerabilities in old versions of software by installing newer versions.

Prepare for a malware attack. Install software to help you to recover from any future malware attacks. This will save time later and you mightn’t have an internet connection after a PC disaster. I would recommend: SuperAntiSpyware and MalwareBytes Anti-Malware.

Install a website security advisor plug-in in your browser. Get advanced warning if you’re going to a dodgy website. Web of Trust and McAfee SiteAdvisor are two possibilities. I use McAfee and it doesn’t seem to slow down browsing appreciably.

Bookmark Bleeping Computer – a great site for instructions on malware removal. Bookmark it now, just in case.

PC won’t boot at all

It may seem obvious but if your PC isn’t booting at all, no LEDs are lit and no fans are spinning, check your power cable is connected and power is on. Check for a poor or loose connection. Try a spare power cable if you have one or check the fuse in the plug.

If your machine was working, suddenly stopped and won’t reboot, is the case hot? You could check for dust build up inside the case. If this is the cause of the problem, take your PC outside and blow out all the dust with a can of compressed air. If dust build up wasn’t the problem, check your video card and memory sticks are properly seated.

Router problems

Know your router IP address so you can access the router set-up screen. To get this Click Start, Run, type cmd and click okay. Type ipconfig at the command prompt and press enter. Look for the Default Gateway, it’s probably something like 192.68.1.101. Then type exit to leave the command prompt. If you type this number after http:// in your browser address bar you will reach your router set-up screen (after entering your router username and password). If you can’t remember your router username and password, try the default username and password which the router was supplied with. You’ll find it here. If that doesn’t work because you changed these details, you can reset it back to the factory default values. Here’s a good post about resting your router password. But be sure to choose your own router username and password again later. Make a note of the router IP address and your router username and password in your folder for future reference.

Take a photo or screen shot of the router set-up screen. Store it in Evernote and your folder. Also do this before you upgrade your router, if the old one still works. Keep hold of the old router as a backup in case you need it again. You’ve now captured the router set-up details and can reset the information if you run into router problems.

Use WPA encryption. Now that you are in router set-up, check that you are using WPA and not WEP encryption for added security.

Further help

Identify a good PC repair shop in your area – Do this before you run into problems. Perhaps a friend can recommend a good shop in your area. Find out their rates, turnaround time, etc.

Sign up to some tech forums ahead of any problems so you are ready to ask advice to help you recover from your disaster. Podnutz and Tech Support Guy are good.

Additional disaster precautions for a laptop

Make a note of your laptop serial number in your folder in case of theft.

Install Prey to help track down your stolen laptop in case of theft.

Further reading

How to survive the worst PC disasters

Prepare for disaster – assembling a PC first-aid kit

Hopefully I’ve covered all the bases here at the basic precautions level. If you follow these tips and you don’t feel able to recover your own machine, your repair tech will love you as you walk in with a driver backup disk, backup external hard drive or cloned hard drive and PC inventory. Hopefully this will make his job easier and cut your repair bill.

The next part of this look at preparing for PC recovery will be slightly more roll your sleeves up, but again from the point of view of a non-PC repair technician. If I’ve I missed anything important at the basic level drop a comment below. What steps do you take to prepare for a PC disaster?

Some tips on preparing for a PC disaster is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

Image credit: M.V. Jantzen

Really quick one today but it may help someone out. A friend recently sent me a jpeg she couldn’t open on her PC. I went to my free graphics editor IrfanView and tried to open it. It prompted Warning! The file xxx.jpg is a TIF file with incorrect extension! Rename? Once it had renamed it with the tif extension, there was no problem opening it and then saving as a jpeg. I learned today on Twitter (@WollemiPine) that this also works if a jpeg is really a bmp file with the wrong extension.

So if you’re having problems opening a jpeg or indeed another graphics file format, and you haven’t tried IrfanView, download it and see if in fact it’s been saved with the wrong extension. It won’t always work – you may not be able to open your jpeg because of a corrupt header for example.

A search for slow firefox on Twitter shows that there is a virtually constant stream of tweets complaining about Firefox being slow. I don’t find the current Firefox (Windows) release any quicker or slower than previous versions yet many people are under the impression that it is. I do find it’s still a memory hog – for me, currently around 230MB with 5 tabs open, about 20 plug-ins installed and 3 Greasemonkey scripts enabled – so probably about a typical set-up. Before you start, it may be worth checking that you’re not blaming Firefox for what’s just a slow internet connection. Check your connection is up to speed by visiting SpeedTest.net and testing the speed of your connection. So is there anything that the typical user can try which might help speed things up before throwing up their arms in disgust and moving to Chrome or Safari? Well I hope this list of tips might help:

Some tips to speed up Firefox

1. Uninstall the latest buggy Skype plug-in: If you are experiencing that Facebook, GMail or Google Reader are really crawling and you’ve recently updated Skype to version 4.1 and installed the Skype plug-in for Firefox, try uninstalling the Skype plug-in, but leave the main Skype program installed. That should help. Hopefully, Skype will update this plug-in soon because, reading the tweets on slow firefox, it’s certainly responsible for driving a number of people away to other browsers, particularly Chrome.

2. Check how much memory Firefox is using: Bring up Windows Task Manager with Ctrl-Alt-Del in Windows XP or Crtl-Alt-Esc in Vista and go to the Processes tab. Look for the process called firefox.exe and check the memory usage: for example, 230,000K is 230MB. Try cutting back on the number of tabs you have open and uninstall any plug-ins you really don’t need and see if this brings down memory usage. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have installed plug-ins which seemed a good idea at the time but which you now rarely, if ever use. Uninstall them.

Edit (13 March 2010): From Creoffblog, if you have an antivirus anti-phishing toolbar add-on, try disabling it as this may be causing the slow down.

3. Do some maintenance: Use a program like CCleaner (for Windows) or BleachBit (for Windows or Linux) to clear your browser temporary files, internet cache and browser history regularly.

4. Modify the Firefox config file: Here’s some tweaks which involve modifying the config file for Firefox. I’d heard some of these a while ago on the Mike Tech Show podcast, also at Life Rocks 2.0. It’s not difficult to edit the config file. Just type about:config in the Firefox address bar and press enter. Then type network.http in the filter field. This will filter the list down to only those with network.http in the name. Now make the following changes:

• Double click on ‘network.http.pipelining’ and set the value to true (double clicking toggles the value between true and false).
• Double click on network.http.pipelining.maxrequests’ and in the dialog box enter a value higher than the default value 4. According to Mozillazine, the maximum you can use is 8.
• Double click on ‘network.http.proxy.pipelining’ and set the value to true.
• Again in the filter field enter ‘browser.sessionstore.interval‘ (without the quotes), double click on the entry and change the value from 10000 (10 secs) to 120000 (2 minutes). This adjusts how frequently Firefox creates session restore save points. Firefox will now take a snapshot of your browsing session every 2 minutes instead of every 10 seconds.
• Right click on the page and select New->Integer. Enter the name nglayout.initialpaint.delay and then click ok. Set the integer value of this to 0 and click ok.

You can find additional great config file tweaks at Technically Personal.

5. Disable Firebug: If you’re using Firebug, it can slow Firefox to a crawl.

6. Optimize Firefox’s SQL database: Firefox uses SQLite databases to store lots of its settings. With time, the databases grow and Firefox slows down. Use either Vacuum Places Improved, a Firefox add-on, or SpeedyFox, a stand-alone app to compact these databases without losing any data. I prefer SpeedyFox as I like to keep the number of Firefox add-ons to a minimum.  Only works in Windows at the moment though. Thanks again to Life Rocks 2.0 for this tip. I also use the portable version which doesn’t modify the Windows registry.

7. Try Memory Fox, a memory optimizer for Firefox 3. It constantly flushes Firefox’s memory usage. At the moment it’s only for the Windows OS. There’s a full write up on ghacks.net.

8. If you’re still not happy with Firefox, there’s a terrific Firefox Troubleshooting Guide over on MakeUseOf.com. And have a look at this post at Dedoimedo for more suggestions.

9. And if you’re still not happy, try Google Chrome – it’s a worthy alternative to Firefox.

Do you have any tips for speeding up Firefox? Drop a comment below with your tweaks.

I posted recently on trying the Google Chrome browser after Google Reader and Google Mail suddenly slowed to a crawl in Firefox. It turned out that the latest Skype extension for Firefox was causing the problem. I had upgraded Skype to version 4.1.0.141 and elected to install the Skype extension for Firefox during the Skype upgrade. Others have also reported this problem recently.

So if you’re experiencing problems with Firefox suddenly being a lot slower than usual, particularly when viewing Google Reader, Google Mail and Facebook and you’ve recently upgraded Skype and installed the Skype extension for Firefox, uninstall it and things should improve. Doubtless Skype will fix this buggy extension in a later release. Thanks to Scotian who posted in the comments of the Chrome post and resolved this problem.