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Help with this laptop, please.

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First post, by Kerr Avon

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I have an old laptop, an Acer Aspire E1 Z5WE1 NXMEPEK Laptop E1-570 Intel i5 CPU (8 GB RAM, Windows 10), that until recently was running fine. But sometime in the past few weeks, it's developed two faults, which may be connected to each other, I don't know. These two faults are:

Fault 1 - When I double click on a program, or a game, or a text file on the desktop, etc, then there is a pause of about eight or ten seconds, with the Windows 10 swirling circle swirling around, before the game (or program, or text file, etc) begins to load. After this pause, though the program or game loads as normal and plays at full speed and with no problems. And when I exit the program, or game, etc, then when I double click on a different program, game, etc, then the ten seconds or so of swirling circle reappears, before the laptop starts to load the game/program/etc.

Prior to this fault appearing, a few weeks ago, whenever I double clicked on a game or program, etc, then it would start to load immediately, as it normally should.

Fault 2 - When I use the web browser Brave on the laptop, then after opening say a dozen pages (whether I leave all the pages open, or I close one before opening another) then the web pages stop opening, it's as though the web signal stops getting through. This also happens if I use Firefox instead (I've not tried a third browser on the laptop yet). Every other item in my house that can connect to the web (my desktop PC, my tablet, my game consoles, etc) works fine, it's just the laptop that displays this problem. Again, up until a few weeks back, this problem didn't exist, and I could open new pages without problem. My laptop is wirelessly connected to the router, as are the other things.

The laptop seems to be working fine other than these two problems, Windows 10 is up to date, and the laptop is always plugged in, so it's presumably not a battery related issue. Both Malwarebytes and Avast! antivirus show the laptop as being uninfected, the laptop has two SSD drives (one of which has replaced the DVD drive, via an internal hard drive caddy, months ago, so not related to these problems), and no mechanical drive. I have run

chkdsk C: /F /X

and

SFC /Scannow

and

DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth

with no errors detected. I don't want to reformat and reinstall everything, because there are many games and programs installed, and other than these two faults, everything seems fine.

Any ideas or suggestions, please?

Reply 1 of 13, by BitWrangler

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A few observations that may or may not be relevant...

Ancient problem with Firefox and Netscape before it, and others with code commonality, is it was somehow incapable of keeping the TCP/IP "alive", like it would timeout unless some other application accessed it. It was fine if you were loading something every 5 mins, but leave it just too long and nothing. This tended not to be noticeable if you were running messaging apps like ICQ, AIM etc which would keep it live. IDK if it was a relic from hanging up if idle code to stop you racking up charges back in the days of modems and per minute connect fees.

Second thing with Firefox, which is a brick wall I kept running into with it, is it seems to only be able to run so many scripts before they get looped in race conditions, hung or whatever, or otherwise disfunctional.... and it uses scripts for everything... in some sense Firefox is a webbrowser that runs on a webbrowser... meaning all the controls etc are done in scripts, so you've got 50 running with a single tab open looking at <html><body><H1>Hello World!</H1></body></html>.... anyway, in the noughts I could get about 50 tabs open, then I guess pages I use got more scripty and in the teens I'd get 20, and now I only get a dozen and it messes up. I figure for given config it has like a 2000 script limit or something, as soon as enough pages open to get there, lockups and crawls. Maybe it's like 16 bit windows with the stacks in user.exe and gdi.exi, whatever keeps track of scripts gets full or doesn't flush or something... I try to get back to using firefox and hit that brick wall every time.

Time for opening thing... Windows... what a bastard... well in two ways, don't know if you are aware but when MS updates a component it might set any settings related to it back to default, or all user settings back to default in some situations, super annoying, especially stuff you can't explicitly save. Anyway if it turned some extra security on like verifying app signatures every time, or runtime scan of all exes, that you thought you had off, check it, MS maybe screwed with settings.

Second way is, who the hell knows how it's caching logic works these days, it's like how a browser never remembers a site you go to three to five times a week and you have to type the whole damn thing every time, then one typo you made 5 years ago is "cast in amber" So every time you go to go to eBay it fills it in eBat.cpm or whatever you fumbled in that ancient time... yeah, well some of the ever so helpful caching stuff is like that, it can contain parts of the programs you use ALLLL the time, so they load real quick... or that one thing you clicked on this week that you haven't touched in months somehow prioritised itself and wiped all that out, in favour of THAT starting real quick now, even though it's gonna be months before you ever launch again... so maybe that will get back to normal in a day of use or maybe it will play a new stupid to have favorite.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 2 of 13, by Kerr Avon

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Being a Windows user is wonderful, isn't it? [/painfully miserable sarcasm].

I *might* have solved both of the problems with the laptop. I had begun uninstalling things that might be slowing the system down, and when I uninstalled Avast! Anti-virus, and rebooted, then everything started to load almost immediately when I double clicked on their icon. Success! So I rebooted, and re-installed Avast!, and the slowdown was back. I uninstalled Avast!, rebooted, and for the last couple of days everything is working fine, including the former second problem of the browser refusing to load more than a few pages.

I can sort of understand how Avast! could perhaps go wrong and start scanning things and so slow down loading (if I doble clicked on three .TXT files in a row, for example, then each one would take say eight or ten seconds to open, even if each .TXT file was only two or three kilobytes in size).

But I can't understand how Avast! could cause a web browser to stop loading after a few pages, though.

Anyway, everything seems fine now, and I am currently using Windows Defender as I don't want to rock the boat until I am sure that the two problems have been fixed - many times I have supposedly fixed a PC related problem, only for it to re-appear again later, so I am suspicious especially of easy fixes such as this one.

What good, free anti-viruses do you recommend, please?

Reply 3 of 13, by ratfink

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Interested to see what advice you get.

Is there a reason not to use Windows Defender? I thought they were all liable to fail to find "novel" malware but once something had been discovered in the wild they all updated definitions pretty quickly. Oh I see googling tells me "Windows Defender lacks endpoint protection and response" which seems relate to business networks with remote connections (so not an issue for the home user), "and automated investigation and remediation" which could mean all sorts of things and is too imprecise to know whether to worry.

Reply 4 of 13, by Kerr Avon

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ratfink wrote on 2024-09-23, 22:09:

Interested to see what advice you get.

Is there a reason not to use Windows Defender? I thought they were all liable to fail to find "novel" malware but once something had been discovered in the wild they all updated definitions pretty quickly. Oh I see googling tells me "Windows Defender lacks endpoint protection and response" which seems relate to business networks with remote connections (so not an issue for the home user), "and automated investigation and remediation" which could mean all sorts of things and is too imprecise to know whether to worry.

I don't know that there is reason not to use Microsoft Defender, it's just that I have little faith in Microsoft personally. I've been using Windows since Windows 95 was new, that's nearly thirty years of bugs (of all sizes), glitches, crashes, security flaws, and anti-consumer decisions, so I don't tend to trust or rely on anything by Microsoft, instead I'd usually prefer a third party, dedicated solution. But I have read from many sources that Defender is a really good AV now, and is good enough to rely on (especially if it's used with Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, for the belt and braces approach). And yes, all AVs will occasionally find false positives, it's just the nature of the universe, but fifty false positives are better than one false negative, of course.

Reply 5 of 13, by GemCookie

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Kerr Avon wrote on 2024-09-23, 14:28:

Being a Windows user is wonderful, isn't it? [/painfully miserable sarcasm].

Yeah... like macOS, Linux and the BSDs don't have any issues at all.

ratfink wrote on 2024-09-23, 22:09:

Is there a reason not to use Windows Defender?

Its real-time protection cripples performance on dual-core CPUs. As far as I can tell, the only way to disable it permanently is to defenestrate the Defender executable.

Gigabyte GA-8I915P Duo Pro | P4 530J | GF 6600 | 2GiB | 120G HDD | 2k/Vista/10
MSI MS-5169 | K6-2/350 | TNT2 M64 | 384MiB | 120G HDD | DR-/MS-DOS/NT/2k/XP/Ubuntu
Dell Precision M6400 | C2D T9600 | FX 2700M | 16GiB | 128G SSD | 2k/Vista/11/Arch/OBSD

Reply 6 of 13, by BitWrangler

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I just keep defender on here, because it's not THAT bad, and I've had bad experience with other vendors stuff being over paranoid and making your system run as if it was 2 generations older AND absolutely infested with virii.... (I specifically requested the opposite of that.) ... so I keep things well tuned up and am sensitive to off pattern behavior, I'm not infallible but over the years I've nailed a couple of viruses two weeks before they showed up in anyone's definition updates.

Anyway, the tides seem to shift frequently in the antivirus world, from good, resource friendly, up to date, to resource pigs that miss stuff that's months old, and this goes around from vendor to vendor, one year they are hot stuff, next year they're awful. Well you get what I'm saying I hope, but it seems more like a 2 to 3 year cycle.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 7 of 13, by momaka

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Kerr Avon wrote on 2024-09-23, 14:28:

What good, free anti-viruses do you recommend, please?

None.

I've been going without one for the last 15+ years... and funny enough, for the same exact reason as your experience - I put AVAST! on a few PCs and they slowed down to a crawl. Switched to AVG for a short while, but eventually ran into the same issue. So I said hell with these and never looked back after uninstalling.

Now, bad comes to worse, I've straightened a few systems (not my own) using MalwareBytes only and a bit of "manual" hunting/cleaning.
Viruses aren't that common these days. Most "infections", IME, tend to be user error/stupidity (i.e. visiting naughty websites you shouldn't be, or worse, clicking on their ads.) In that regard, using an ad blocker of some sort usually helps a bunch. In the days before Windows 10, you could also disable DNS service and use a HOSTS file for additional (and better) protection against known infected sites. Windows 10 doesn't (easily) allow the disabling of its built-in DNS service though, so it's hard to get a HOSTS file working properly.

Reply 8 of 13, by GemCookie

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I've come to the same conclusion about antivirus software – it acts like malware at the best of times.

momaka wrote on 2024-09-24, 22:01:

In the days before Windows 10, you could also disable DNS service and use a HOSTS file for additional (and better) protection against known infected sites. Windows 10 doesn't (easily) allow the disabling of its built-in DNS service though, so it's hard to get a HOSTS file working properly.

This is why blocking domains at the router level is a good idea. It also saves time over configuring the hosts file for every computer.

Gigabyte GA-8I915P Duo Pro | P4 530J | GF 6600 | 2GiB | 120G HDD | 2k/Vista/10
MSI MS-5169 | K6-2/350 | TNT2 M64 | 384MiB | 120G HDD | DR-/MS-DOS/NT/2k/XP/Ubuntu
Dell Precision M6400 | C2D T9600 | FX 2700M | 16GiB | 128G SSD | 2k/Vista/11/Arch/OBSD

Reply 9 of 13, by BitWrangler

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"Pihole" is the new hosts file pretty much.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 10 of 13, by momaka

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GemCookie wrote on 2024-09-26, 08:46:

This is why blocking domains at the router level is a good idea. It also saves time over configuring the hosts file for every computer.

Agreed.
Problem is, I never learned how to do that, or at least easily. Most routers I've used didn't really have a "batch" way of copy-pasta-ing content from my hosts file, so I just didn't bother. Perhaps DD-WRT or one of those other alternative router firmwares do? That's really another area I never explored... and with time, seeing where the web is headed, I started caring even less to learn now.

Reply 11 of 13, by Kerr Avon

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I think I will stick with MS Defender, at least for the time being.

GemCookie wrote on 2024-09-24, 16:21:
Kerr Avon wrote on 2024-09-23, 14:28:

Being a Windows user is wonderful, isn't it? [/painfully miserable sarcasm].

Yeah... like macOS, Linux and the BSDs don't have any issues at all.

I've not used MacOS or Linux (or BSD, which I had to google, as I thought you meant the Windows' Blue Screen of Death, but that of course didn't fit your context), so I'm certainly not comparing them to Windows, I'm just saying that objectively Windows has all kind of faults, stupid design decisions, instabilities, etc. I mean, since Windows 95, users have been asking for the ability to right-click on a folder and print out a directory listing, yet up to Windows 10 (I don't use Windows 11, so I can't comment on that) Microsoft still hasn't listened. I don't know anyone who asked for Katan or Co-Pilot, but MS lumbered us with those. If it wasn't for the countless (and mostly free) programs by amateur users that provide Windows with the features that people want, then I think many more users, myself included, would have tried other OSes long ago. And if someone other than Microsoft brought out a new OS that was 100% compatible with Windows software, then I would gladly give that a try, and I'm sure millions of other users would do the same.

Reply 12 of 13, by DosFreak

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momaka wrote on 2024-09-29, 23:25:
GemCookie wrote on 2024-09-26, 08:46:

This is why blocking domains at the router level is a good idea. It also saves time over configuring the hosts file for every computer.

Agreed.
Problem is, I never learned how to do that, or at least easily. Most routers I've used didn't really have a "batch" way of copy-pasta-ing content from my hosts file, so I just didn't bother. Perhaps DD-WRT or one of those other alternative router firmwares do? That's really another area I never explored... and with time, seeing where the web is headed, I started caring even less to learn now.

opnsense FW w/ZenArmor. I just export noscript allowed domains from each computer and then upload to the web category in ZenArmor to allow. (I block everything by default)

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Reply 13 of 13, by momaka

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DosFreak wrote on 2024-09-30, 15:04:

opnsense FW w/ZenArmor. I just export noscript allowed domains from each computer and then upload to the web category in ZenArmor to allow. (I block everything by default)

Thanks for sharing. I suppose this needs adding to the (ever expanding) list of stuff I need to try/do some day.
RE noscript and blocking everything by default: tried this method before and not a fan. Noscript tends to break most pages, including my online banking. And blocking everything is a no-go as occasionally I need to do online searches that might take me who knows where. Too much work to have to add a page on the no-block list just to see it.

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