YouTube and Facebook.

[peter]

Whenever I go on either of these sites my laptop slows down to shit after I come of them. Why is that - is it that they are full of viruses - trojans and the like - or is there another reason. The only really bad virus I ever got was from facebook and I have no idea how I shifted it in the end - I think it just went on it's own (I often find when I have been away on holiday for a week or two and the computer has been left to itself, it seems to sort out all sorts of weird little problems. How does it do that?).

What are your experiences in this area - does anyone else find this with the above two sites. I can normally sort it with a vigorous bout of deleting but it's a pain!

[deer of the dawn]

Both sites are bandwidth hogs. I never got a virus from either, but since I'm in Nigeria I can almost never load youtube videos. If you can get on a faster connection it should be better.

[peter]

Hi DOTD . It's not so much that I get trouble streaming or anything (though I occasionally do and I know that my connection speed is not great) but more that when I come off the sites my laptop is really slow to respond and 'jerky', sometimes to the point of almost freezing altogether. It does happen with other sites too (but never with KW or wikipedia or ebay/amazon etc). It's bad enough for me to pretty much avoid going on the two sites altogether (no great loss in the case of fb, but I do like YouTube). As I say I do get round it by doing a 'delete all' after using the sites, but this can be really slow after use of these sites - it's like my laptop has been filled up with crap that is log-jamming the hard drive or something. Just wondered if I'm the only one who gets this trouble or not.

[I'm Murrin]

How up to date is Flash on your PC? Also, viruses don't cure themselves, run an antivirus.

[MsMary]

Try emptying your cache and restarting your browser.

Some browsers suck up memory over time, the longer you use them, the more memory they suck up.

[Ananda]

Try using clicktoflash.com/ It replaces flash with html5 player which is much more efficient than flash. There is also flashblock, etc. Instll plugins for your browser through your browser.

[peter]

Thanks guy's - I update the 'flashplayer whenever prompted to do so and do pretty frequent anti-viral runs, but this doesn't seem to alter the situation. Looking at all the notebooks, tablets etc available now I'm thinking that my old laptop (five/six years?) may be coming to the end of it's useful. The suggestions are great and when I can get the kid's to sit still long enough to help me implement them I'll give them a go! In the meantime guess I'll just have to count my 'friends' by the number of birthday cards I get rather than by the 'zillions' on facebook .

[aliantha]

You've likely hit on it, peter -- your processor is probably too slow to handle the crap on teh intarwebz today. I had similar chronic problems with slowdowns 'til I upgraded my machine.