What Causes Firefox To Slowdown

Well, here are the things I observed that causes Firefox to slow down significantly:

• The more tabs or windows you open, the slower Firefox gets as it increases significantly more RAM consumption and CPU usage.
• Viewing web pages with Adobe Flash and streaming videos on many tabs simultaneously will cause Firefox to slow down heavily until sometimes it becomes unresponsive. If you are in Windows Vista and your memory is low, the more you are to experience this kind of slowdown symptom. Adobe Flash player is a monster plugin and it causes Firefox web browser to consume more RAM and CPU. In fact, I have experienced on my system that the videos streamed through this player pauses every two seconds and it sucks.
• If you have installed and enabled a lot of Firefox extensions, there is a big chance that Firefox 3 will eat a lot of RAM and CPU, causing the web browser to slow down as a result. While there are lots of nice and useful Firefox extensions out there that adds more exciting to your web browsing, I highly recommend that you only enable the extensions you really need if you want speed.
• Same would be the case if you have a lot of plug-ins installed and enabled. However, unlike Firefox extensions, plug-ins are usually invoked on certain pages who use it. So, the slowdown chance is not that great. By the way, Adobe Flash player, the one that is invoked when you watch YouTube and similar sites, is a Mozilla Firefox plug-in.
• If you have a slow computer system. If your laptop or personal computer is slow on system RAM and your processor has slower clock speed, you will definitely notice more how Firefox will slowdown each day especially if you experience the above-mentioned causes. I am on a decent laptop with Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a SATA hard disk drive and 3 gigabytes of RAM, so it’s a bit mysterious as to why Firefox 3 still slows down.

How To Make Firefox 3 Faster

Now, for sure these procedures will make Firefox 3 feel faster again:

• Defragment your hard disk drive.
• Clear Firefox cache and all your system temporarily files.
• Disable all your Firefox extensions.
• Get a faster computer with higher clock speeds and generous RAM supply.
• Don’t visit sites that uses plugins that causes Firefox to slowdown (well, don’t follow this if you like to watch YouTube a lot).

Now, if those things don’t work for you, maybe it’s time to consider other newer web browsers that runs simultaneous threads at the same time: Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Google Chrome are the best alternatives.

If you experience slowdown on Mozilla Firefox 3 web browser too, drop your comments below and let’s tell the world that this browser gets worse each day.

Update: By the way today, Mozilla released Firefox version 3.0.2, let’s see what it can do.

What You Need

You basically need money to buy a brand new mobile SATA hard disk either second-hand or brand new. Remember if you buy to tell the computer store’s salesperson that you need a mobile SATA hard disk and not just SATA hard disk. A mobile SATA hard disk is meant for a laptop/notebook and is a lot smaller (2.5 inches) making it mobile than the normal hard disk equipped on personal computers which is 3.5 inches. Mobile SATA hard disks are costlier than regular HDDs but its price is worth the mobility. I’ll leave up to you to do online research or do in-store canvassing regarding the price of mobile SATA HDDs.

So, you got the mobile SATA HDD? Another thing you need to buy is a 2.5′ external hard disk enclosure. You will manually setup this and put the mobile SATA hard disk you bought inside. A good mobile SATA hard disk enclosure is made from aluminum or any material that is a good heat conductor. This will let the tiny hard disk’s heat to dissipate more quickly when it is in operating mode. Hard disks are known to produce a lot of heat when used frequently. Once you’re done with the enclosure setup, you’re good to go. You can bring and hook your hard disk at virtually any computer using a fast USB 2.0 connection. Plus, unlike enclosures meant for 3.5′ HDDs, you don’t need to have an external power for your external drive to work. It’s truly mobile. I just bought one in the past weeks as described on a blog post about my disk shortage with my current hard disk and so, the external mobile SATA drive is a great addition. So far I’m loving it.

Venturing on that, let’s go to the simple real-word situation where you want to convert a wave file format (.wav files) to MP3 (.mp3): how would you do this since Windows operating systems do not have default utility that lets you convert such files? Another situation for advanced users is when you are working with videos: how are you going to convert you .avi files to .mpeg and burn them in CDs and DVDs so you could play them on your favorite DVD player? The answer is simple: use all-in-one Blaze Media Pro software.

About Blaze Media Pro

Blaze Media Pro is a powerful all-in-one multimedia application that offers multiple functionality. It is a video and audio conversion software, ripping, video and audio file editing, CD recording, CD burning software, playback, and much more. VCD, SVCD, and DVD burning software formats are fully supported too. With Blaze Media Pro, you can convert DVD to AVI, MPG, WMV and other video file formats. Other advanced features include video capture, video creation, combining, and extraction, video editing, copying of music CDs, audio and video merge (joining), MusicID audio recognition, lyrics search, audio tag editing, FreeDB support, and more. The audio content of video files can be extracted and saved to sound files, and frames can also be extracted to images files in batch mode. Video files can also be created from still frame images and/or other videos. 

One thing I liked with Blaze Media Pro is its wide support of different audio and file formats which is very useful for audio and video professional and enthusiasts. I’ve done so many projects in the past and all I can say is that it helps a lot when you have a unified utility for all the functions that you need for your project.

Now, those are great benefits all combined in a single software. I’ve used this already for over a year and I am still happy with it. So, I think it would be nice to share so I made this post.

This month I felt that my Windows Vista Home Premium still getting slower and slower each day, although my laptop’s specs are a lot better now than what it once was, . And I highly suspect that my outdated laptop BIOS and near-full hard disk drive are causing this. This utterly means that I will need to buy a new external hard drive pretty soon so that I can free some space from my hard disk and recover some speed. See my hard disk’s gauge above. It’s pathetic.   I’ve already have removed large video files, emptied my recycle bin and deleted all temporary files and uninstalled unnecessary programs, but it didn’t truly helped at all.

Online Computer Stores Give Ideas

I checked this online computer store Super Warehouse to get some idea how much it would cost me to get a new mobile hard drive. I am planning to get a mobile SATA, then I’ll put it on a mobile hard disk enclosure so I can use it like a large capacity USB drive. On the site I also browsed the notebooks section, to see what’s the latest gaming laptop specs I wish one day I could reward myself one. I am particularly in loved with Acer, HP Laptops and Sony laptops having high-end processors, high definition speakers, and discrete graphics card. I like Apple laptops too, especially the Macbook Air, but it’s rather too much for me (the price, that is). I currently own a Neo Empriva 540NVP2i  laptop and I am pretty sure only Filipinos knew this brand.

Finally, I browsed through Super Warehouse’s digital camera section. I saw that new digital cameras are now reaching beyond 10 megapixel level, which is awesome. If I had the money, I would probably get a Sony or Samsung digital camera and then pair it with some photo printers — but I don’t have, so I left the site and just wrote this post.

How about you, what you buy these days if you have the money for a computer store?

Like what I promised in the previous post concerning Vista Codec Package, I’m going to show you some nifty features not-enabled-by-default that comes with it to beef up your lame Windows Media Player 11. Unlike Media Player Classic, which comes subtitle loading features in-built with it, Windows Media Player 11′s default subtitle functionality is too limited. It can only load subtitle files placed on same directory as the video file — likewise there’s workaround! On this post I will teach you how to show custom subtitles (i.e., using SRT subtitle file format, among others). This tutorial is effective to other compatible media players installed in your system as well. So here it goes…

Supposed that you downloaded a movie from torrent websites and you want to load a subtitle with it in Windows Vista’s Windows Media Player 11, the first thing you need to do is to install the latest Vista Codec Package first. As of this writing, I’m using the its latest 32-bit version described in my previous post. Install the codec package that is suitable for your computer system and come back to this article.

After you’ve installed Vista Codec Package, and if your downloaded movie does not come with subtitle files, I highly recommend that you search and download an appropriate subtitle from opensubtitles.org, an Internet subtitle database website. Download an .SRT subtitle format from the search result page as shown below.

Assuming that you already downloaded the correct subtitle file to your local computer, the next thing to do now is to configure Vista Codec Package to load this file. To do this, click Vista’s Orb “Start” button in the task bar, click All Programs and scroll down to VistaCodecs folder. Click 32bit Tools, and then Video Decoder Configuration to load ffdshow filter. Although we can use vobSub filter to show subtitles on Windows Media Player 11, I prefer to disable it to prevent conflicts with ffdshow.

Now, when ffdshow window is loaded, go to Tray, dialog and paths and configure the video filter  to show an icon in the system tray. Select Modern as the tray icon as show in the screenshot below. 

Now, to configure ffdshow to show subtitle files, scroll down the ffdshow window and check Subtitles. Set the correct local directory where you stored your subtitle file in the Search in field while keeping other settings default.

When you load a movie file, it will search this directory and loads automatically the subtitle file that matches the movie. Otherwise, you can manually select from the list of subtitles stored in your subtitle directory when you right click the ffdshow system tray icon and hover to Subtitle Source when you play a movie file! Just like that!

If you need support for this, don’t hesitate to contact me on chat. Enjoy!

Without third party codec support, Windows Media Player 11 (and even Windows Media Center) that comes in the default installation of Windows Vista operating system is truly lame. And even though it deserves merits for its sleek design, it still lags behind even to opensource media players. I once hailed Media Player Classic to be the best media player in Windows Vista, but since I  pity much Windows’ media player home court, I sought a way to beef it up functionality-speaking –  and here’s how.

By default, Windows Media Player 11 cannot play many kinds of media files which is truly disappointing. But there’s a way to solve this: you only need to download third-party video and audio codecs or update your existing ones. Codecs, which in full term means “compressor-decompressor,” is a way video and audio files are shrunk to relatively small file sizes with a little loss to none of its video and sound quality.

So, let’s get started and upgrade your Windows Media Player 11. Among all video codecs I’ve found on the Internet, the best one that suits WMP 11 especially when you are on Windows Vista is the latest versions of Vista Codec Packages by Shark007. It is one of the most active video codec packages to give you the best media playback functionality. As of this writing, the latest version is 4.7.2 for 32-bit Windows Vista (15.3 MB) and version 1.5.1 for 64-bit (5.88 MB). These versions are far better than before so download the right one and install it.

After installation, try playing some video files that didn’t play before and you’ll be surprised to watch them with glory on Windows Media Player and Media Center. Finally, other than media file playback, there are still lots of cool features hidden inside Vista Codec Package (to let you know). I will write about them in my future posts so stand by.

My hard disk enclosure’s power cable is similar to the power cord of personal computer systems. For me, it was a bit hard to detect why my enclosure had no power until I found out real cause. It came into my mind immediately that if the problem happened on my PC, it could potentially damage other hardware components. As I recalled, the computer cords I had were made in China. There have lots of news about questionable products from that country, especially imitations. I’m not saying that all products from China are substandard, but it seems for me that digital products (computer cables in general) made from United States are far better in terms of quality and reliability hands down. The cord’s rubber coating is usually thicker and sturdier.

I realized now that buying quality products are better investment than getting cheaper versions that do not last long or could even pose a risk. As for my old computer’s power cable and my hard disk enclosure, I’m going to find a new one – definitely ones made from USA. I would do the same with my other hardware electronics, otherwise it could potentially cause fire.

System Configuration

My laptop (Neo 540NVP2i) runs with 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 processor (two cores) and Windows Vista Home Premium. It came with 1 GB RAM default but I upgraded it to 2 GB after few months of purchase because I realized that it was not good enough for multitasking of my commonly used productivity software (in addition to our knowledge that Vista is a memory hog). Now, the RAM is upgraded again to 3 GB as mentioned above.

The image below tells more about my mobile computer’s processor features.

This one tells about the additional DDR 2 RAM stick I bought for the upgrade. The RAM upgrade costs Php 2,050 (more or less $50 US dollars).

Windows Vista or Motherboard BIOS Bug?

I wonder why but if you look at the image below taken from Windows Vista’s Welcome Screen, it reported 5 GB RAM. It was wrong since I only installed a total of 3 GB on both slots. When I rebooted my system and entered the BIOS configuration, my motherboard correctly detected 3 GB RAM – telling me that this might be another Vista bug or something.

How 3 GB RAM Vista Feels Like

After adding the new 2 GB DDR2 RAM to achieve a total RAM of 3 GB, the boot-up process is tad longer than before because of the bigger capacity of RAM which makes boot-up RAM test longer. I noticed that applications running on my Windows Vista Home Premium are now faster and they don’t feel “choked” with RAM resource shortage. However, it did not increase the total speed of the system – though the little lags when you switch on different programs are noticeably gone. Windows Vista feels better with 3 GB RAM – period.

Now, web browsing at the same time running Adobe Dreamweaver, Photoshop and all instant messengers from Yahoo Messenger to Skype, is a breeze. It would have been much faster if the processor in-built with my laptop is upgradable, but it’s not.

August last year my employer got me a laptop (Neo 540NVP2i) with the following specifications: 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 1 GB DDR2 memory (RAM), 80 GB SATA hard drive, a DVD writer drive, an integrated graphics RAM, and Genuine OEM Windows Vista Home Premium operating system.

My laptop felt great in the beginning. However, when I started to install some software that I used to work with when I was still using my old PC, my system went very slow despite the promises of large RAM and two-core processor. I can still remember that my old PC only had 512 MB RAM, yet it was able to carry out my need. Historically, I added another stick of 512 MB DDR PC2700 memory to it and I was able to gain additional measurable performance on my Windows XP Professional system especially when it comes to video editing, Photoshop editing, and other RAM-intensive applications.

Now with my Vista, I was thinking the same. The package default 1 GB RAM feels like having 512 MB on Windows XP, so I decided to do some upgrades. I bought another stick of 1 GB RAM for my laptop few months ago and the performance gain was rather significant. Still, it is hard to think that with 2 GB RAM, my Vista system still throttles when I am doing multiple tasks. I’ve never encountered an operating system as resource hog as Vista is. Next month, I am thinking of upgrading again to 3 GB. I hope it will work for me, otherwise I could conclude that the problem is not my system but Vista.

The case would be the same for iMac users. If you have enough dough to upgrade and add iMac memory to its default package, go on. It would significantly extend the performance of your system.

The best upgrade and most efficient way of improving the performance of laptops and computers is by adding computer RAM – hands down. You can try browsing the RAMs sold online by Memory Deal. I heard it is good, and it claims to be the “first and only online store offering customers genuine factory original memory modules for each and every memory upgrade.”

If adding RAM doesn’t work for you, check if you need to buy a new laptop or computer.