What do you think happened?

My laptop has 2 GB RAM, X3100 gfx, 250 GB HDD running Vista Home

I was surfing using IE8. I had 3 sessions of IE8 open. Each session had 3 tabs each open. I had VLC playing in the background.

Suddenly, one of the open tabs froze...VLC started sputtering...Task Manager showed 9 IE8 processes.

I had to terminate all instances of IE8.

What do you think happened? IE8 froze and crashed? I can understand that, but why did it affect VLC?

Cheers!

 

I'm not an expert, but I'm guessing that IE8 was using all of the system resources and that make VLC run slow.

 

Wow...even with 2GB of RAM? Maybe I need to add another 1 GB or 1.5GB since I am on a 32-bit machine! But if that is really the case, don't you think it is a bit of an overkill? Or, is this the moment I say to myself, 'welcome to the world of Vista?' But seriously....maxing out 2 GB of RAM?

 

go back to IE7

but I agree w/ above, or it could just be a bug in IE8 that hasn't been ironed out yet.........

 

It might be the RAM... but it might not be. You didn't say what the CPU usage was like when you opened task manager... maybe some page had some javascript or something which made IE hog all your CPU power. Without seeing what your task manager looked like at the time, I can't really say.

That said, IE 8 is very RAM-hungry. I'm running it on 2 gb too, and with no problems... but I don't use VLC so I'm not sure if or how it might affect that.

By the way, IE 8 normally uses a lot of processes if you have a bunch of documents open... that doesn't indicate anything's wrong. But you can certainly free up resources by closing windows and tabs that you don't really need.

 

the only good use of IE is to download Firefox, so do it.

 

There are other resources than just the RAM; for example, there's time on the FSB - each app that gets access to it gets to monopolize for the duration of that access; thus, if something was causing IE8 to go haywire and eat up all the available FSB bandwidth, that would cause other apps to slow and stutter, even if you still had plenty of available RAM sitting around.

 

That's not very helpful. Anyways, I don't like Firefox, but that is not the subject of this thread.

 

Hmmm...did not think of the FSB bottleneck. One of the sites was a flash-heavy site though and folks have previously reported that IE8 does sometimes play up with flash. The thing is though that I have been on other flash heavy sites previously/ earlier and nothing like this happened. I have not been able to recreate this scenario since I reported it here on this thread either.

I was thinking maybe I should add another gig of RAM...worth it you think guys?

Cheers!

Edit: @swarmer: Yeah, that was really stupid of me not to have noted the CPU usage...but I was too taken aback at the time....

Another horrible feeling I am getting is that my machine (Acer 5920) has just gone past its warranty date! I had a really bad xperience with Sony last time. I had a Viao (FE28B), which died exactly (and I mean exactly) 48 hours after the warranty expired!!!!!

 

Um... which laptop are you using? This is probably not Internet explorer 8 issue since it affected VLC player as well. Some laptop using realtek audio chipset have "freezing" problem when the volume is close to maxed out. Some laptop have crappy power supply (acer aspire one), when stressing the system, will cause random freeze, shuttering in media player, BOSDs. etc.

 

Acer 5920...have had it for a year now...first time it has happened. The only thing that has changed is that I put on Vista recently, previously, (and originally) it came with XP Pro.

 

HAVE YOU recently been installing any updates or softwares?

 

None aside from Vista updates and Avira updates. Personally, I think it was an overload of Flash....but strange it happened only once and I have not been able to recreate this scenario...I am back on the same sites, same 3 sessions, same three tabs, VLC (updated, 0.9.9 version) playing...nothing so far!

 

If the system was originally developed to run XP, it's quite possible that there isn't a perfect fit between the drivers needed for _Vista and the hardware, so that every once in a while a driver will get the hiccups and either slow the system down or cause a BSOD.

 

I don't see how that is possible because originally the machine came with some run-of-the-mill linux installation, which I replaced with an OEM version of XP Pro (from Acer), which I subsequently, changed to an OEM version of Vista Home (from Acer). All the drivers are from Acer and are Vista-specific.

Edit: Also, the same machine was (when I bought it) available in XP Pro and Vista versions. I originally wanted a Vista machine, but they did not have it in stock and I would have had to wait for a few weeks. So, I bought the cheapest offer (linux) and got the OEM XP Pro from Acer.

 

That's fair enough; if the same system was being offered from Acer itself with XP on it, then it should be the case that Acer provided all of the appropriate drivers. Still, that doesn't rule out the possibility of a bug in those drivers themselves.

 

That's very true...no idea what the hell these OEMs do!!!!

On another note, I think the problem was/ is IE8 specific. In other words, I think since IE8 spawns off numerous processes, it must have bogged down either the RAM or the CPU or both. I don't understand the inner workings of Vista very well, but from the little I understand, Vista occupies the RAM for whatever purpose, but when the RAM is required by other programs, it releases it. I don't think IE8 would do this, would it? Very likely not because each process of IE8 will need whatever RAM it needs...so eventually, it is possible that IE8 can bog the RAM down if there are too many processes (IE8 windows and tabs running). Am I correct till here?

If yes, then I am guessing the same problem should happen with Chrome....no? Now I have not used Chrome extensively so I would not know, maybe some of you folks who have can give me a heads up?

Cheers!