My latest Vista glitches

Problem 1/ The 'spring-loaded slider bar'. Every now and then (usually when I'm in the middle of writing a long email) the slider bar in the window will jump right up to the top, and attempting to drag it down again just results in it 'springing' right back up again!
A reboot seems like the only solution, and of course you lose what you were working on. This really sucks. Anyone else had this experience?

Problem 2/ IE just plain freezes up - the screen literally 'frosts over' and the program stops. Task Manager shows 'program not responding', so I restart IE and keep fingers crossed (and feel increasingly dumb thereby).

Yes yes I know! - a 'Clean Install'... But I am not looking forward to yet another restore and reconfiguration, with no greater guarantee of satisfaction than I had the first time.

I suspect I am not the only one 'not yet having fun with Vista'

[PS - Or maybe should I blame IE7? Funny I never had so many glitches before Vista came along.]

Dave

 

LoL - Are you sure it's not 'You' or 'Your' imagination?

With so many MS Acolytes around you'd figure they could do no wrong -> *especially 'not' to the 'lil ol' unsuspecting consumer..

..ever wonder why No Corporate networks are being *forced to use Vista or have hopped on the Vista band wagon yet?
..Naturally, they need to get work done - consumers on the otherhand, only twiddle-twaddle their thumbs while looking at the 'pretties'

- Jordan

 

wtf is a "spring loaded slider bar" ?

i'm running vista ultimate on 2.5 year old hardware and have experienced absolutely zero problems with the OS. i would classify myself as a power user as well.

if you could elaborate on your problems, you might get some help.

simply saying that IE7 'freezes up' w/out describing what you're doing at the time doesn't help the fault-isolation process at all.

 

My girlfriend and her female computer consultant seem quite OK with leaving most of the 'pretties' alone. As she says, 'they probably don't make that much difference to the performance'. Right...

Maybe it's us macho guys who are causing all the problems by insisting on ditching the stupid cosmetics and fluff, and undoing all Bill Gates' good work!

I dunno what to believe anymore - I seem to have no control over the OS. And increasingly that seems like the way it's meant to be...

[PS - I wasn't kidding about the spring-loaded slider bars! It's like they're being pulled up by rubber bands! Weird .]

Dave

 

Yea groovon! How dare you gibble-gabble all that non-sensical, anti-ms babble!? Bad! Bad groovon! LoL!

But really, if you need to work, and need a stable, mature OS - there's always XP or 2000 (the latter of which is still widely employed in corporate networks today).

- Jordan

 

Per your problem no 1, I had this "spring" behaviour happening in windows XP as well. Usually it happens when U use a mouse and accidently touch the touchpad. Try to tap on the touchpad once and use the mouse again. This should stop the "spring" behaviour.

Problem no 2. The freezing action could happen from a variety of issues not all related to Vista. Generally U need to provide a dump file of the IE crash to help identify the problem, but I believe that this forum is not intended for such a tech. discussion, and so you should serach for one over the NET. However, if you will post the dump file here I'll try to help you.

 

'Spring-loaded', a mechanical term: the effect of a spring pulling something in one direction and not the other. As I say elsewhere, like a rubber band is pulling the bar upwards while your cursor is trying to drag it down.

This is Vista Premium with a few of the suggested tweaks, on an R61i - sorry i didn't say. [I'm not a Power User, but apparently I *am* a Power F***er-upper!]

Usually I'm not doing much of any one thing when IE freezes, but I think at the time Yahoo Mail may be trying to load the rather large advertisements they have recently foisted upon their customers.

[BTW, how have you got your Vista configured? How much 'streamlining' have you tried to do?]

Dave

 

Oh don't mind that Yahoo 'NotebookYoozer' - he revels at being nasty -> You should see his other posts

He's the type that goes around telling people 'everything' is their fault but none of that applies when he has issues - speaking of which, I doubt there's ever a time when he isn't without any - especially with the way how he pounces on unsuspecting individuals

- Jordan

 

LOL JOrdy!

If I do end up a babbling fool, I'll lay the blame on MS.

Thanks guys for the responses. I think I just need a fresh start in the morning. BTW, my 'old reliable' laptop with XP on it is having it's very own coniption fit right now. It's just been one of those nights...

Cheers,
Dave

 

Such is the right of every 'good' consumer..

After you do you next fresh XP restore/reinstallation, install everything you need and adjust everything to your liking - you might want to consider getting an hard drive imaging program like Acronis True Image Workstation 9.1 ( www.acronis.com)

This way, you can back up your computer just the way you like it and if anything nefarious was to ever happen, OR if you felt that Windows was just being sluggish - a couple clicks and everything is back to normal

- Jordan

 

HUH are we talking about computer here or am I just lost

 

tzachk - I tried to reproduce that problem by fooling with the mouse and the touch pad at the same time. Nothing doing, they seem to work fine in conjunction.

jOrdy - Thanks. I'm in a cooling off period right now. They are not allowing computers into my cell.

8>)

Dave

 

Hi Dave,

Don't try to reproduce the problem by touching the touchpad and moving the mouse. Instead, when you encounter the "spring" problem, tap once on the touchpad and then move the scrollbar with the mouse, the spring effect shoud disappear.

 

It was late, I was tired and frustrated. I was referring (sarcastically) to the possibility that the women mentioned might be right - that maybe just leaving Vista 'as is' will lead to less problems. Excuse me if I wasn't more clear.

PS - And before I get flamed, let me say that I know that it's not only women who think that way. Girly men do, too.

8>)

Dave

 

I don't know of anyone who has solved the Vista freeze up problems by a clean install.

Some people like the idea of cleaning out the caches. That sometimes helps. I think there is a general I/O problem, so the reason that cleaning out caches can help is by reducing the amount of disk I/O which could expose the browser to the problem.

Some people report the freezes only when they are on battery. I am sort of confirming that the past day or two. There have already been several freeze problems confirmed (and some "hotfixed" or addressed by driver updates) in Vista which are related to various differences of power management between components.

So that suggests if there is one thing going on with the as yet unexplained freezes, that it could be a power management issue with some aspect of I/O (including paging).

I don't know about people having freezes when they are not connected to a network either.

Vista does a lot more I/O than XP for some of it's newer capabilities, and there are new flavors of that; also it has more complex networking.

So if you can, try and figure out whether you are getting the glitches on battery or AC, with or without network.

 

A lot of the freezes involve failure of the disk I/O which prevents dump files from being written. And the temporary freezes do not result in events for which there is a dump file.

So no, you don't get dump files with these events. In the event viewer after the fact, all there is is the event of the unexpected power off when you lost patience. I think that event is generated in the recovery. Which means that Vista doesn't realize it's in trouble until it can't do anything.

 

Thanks for the explanation, zp. You seem to know your stuff - should get a job advising MS!

Most of the freeze-ups happen when I'm plugged into AC power, not on the battery. And I'm almost always connected to the internet(s)!! 8>) For the record, I use Yahoo beta, in IE7.

And the freezes are still happening. Glad to hear I'm not the only one, though.

I guess we can expect a solution to all these glitches sometime just before the next OS comes out?

8>)

Dave

 

I really know some stuff, unfortunately it's mostly about Unix from 1987-1997 or so.

I have not had a freeze on AC in the past day. I have the machine on full power on AC.

So now that it's the weekend I'm going to take the plunge and run on battery a lot.

 

Update: Hallelujah! I have not had a freeze on the R61i since my last post.

In that time I've been tweaking the heck out of the OS (safely) using all the info I could find here and from links to other Vista geek forums.

I now have under 1 minute bootup, and increased scores in Passmark and PCMark05. (Will post results on another thread).

The machine is flying! Thanks for everyone's help!

Dave

 

Oh yeah - tzachk, the last two times I got the 'sprung-slider bar' glitch, I took your hint and it went away as soon as I touched the touchpad! I still don't know what causes it though - I wasn't touching the pad before.

Dave