I came across an interesting one in the last few days. This system was a Windows XP system with current updates – SP3, IE 8…. and among other things there was a complaint of very sluggish behavior. I updated the antimalware software installed and ran scans. Malware Bytes antimalware actually found and removed two suspect files, but that didn’t seem to sole the sluggishness. The web browser (internet explorer) would take what seemed like a minute or so to respond to any action. One thing I discovered is that Internet explorer 8 can behave VERY slowly if there are a lot of sites in the restricted zone. (Spybot S&D immunization puts lot’s of sites in restricted zones.) So, I found a way to remove them all and retry and things seemed quicker, but… after running for 15-20 minutes the system really started to become unresponsive and so I had to start looking for another cause…. services.exe was running at 99% cpu or 100% cpu from time to time and the memory footprint was growing – the high mark I saw was 350MB of memory in use for it (!)
Month: July 2009
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Google Voice Review | I got the golden ticket….
Last Thursday I opened up my GMail and found to my surprise that I had an invite to Google Voice. I didn’t have time to deal with it at that time, so I saved it as new until Thursday evening and spent some time then playing with it. I had put my address in the waiting list some time back because the premise behind Google Voice (former GrandCentral) is potentially very useful for me. I’m self employed, I work from home, from the car, I’m onsite, I’m at clients locations and I also have some bits of time at a location that has wireless access. For many years I’ve had several phones to check messages on, and if I forget, then…. find a message when I get in at 8 or 9 in the evening on the house phone. It’s difficult to manage and I want to change it, Google Voice may be the way to make that change….. right now I’m just testing the waters though. It did feel kind of like a Willy Wonka moment of sorts though seeing that invite in the inbox! Read on for more….