Beowser behavior

[Brah]

As one of my PCs is on an old o/s and I have no plans to upgrade it, it has its share of problems.

One of them of late was BSODs, which appeared to be coming from Chrome, more on that if anyone's interested, but I don't really know what to do with crash dumps to know for sure.

This problem is exacerbated by how I use browsers - all of them - IE9, FF, Chrome, Opera, and, with multiple tabs and windows open constantly. Plus I don't reboot more than once a week or so.

I occasionally restart browsers when things get slow.

Task Manager shows Chrome to be very busy even when the PC is not in use, in terms of memory usage as well as CPU load. FF is a memory hog, but seems relatively inactive when the PC is not in use. I haven't been running Opera lately and use IE9 sparingly as it is painfully slow. For Chrome and FF the CPU and memory consumption has a lot to do with what sites are.

I mention all this to see if anyone has any ideas about the working of Chrome, such as is it dong something else on our PCs besides browsing. Or is it constantly building indices, scanning drives, collecting and sending info, etc. or am I just being paranoid.

In FF I use NoScript to block things like google-analytics, googletagservices, etc. but not on Chrome.

[Sporkin]

Bsods are usually indicative of hardware failure, something is happening at kernel level where the OS can't hand the mitigation of the error to anyone else. High CPU use could be due to flaky hardware generating tons of non critical errors. Check the system event viewer to see if anything suspicious show up.

[AngMoG]

You could also try using your favorite flavor of Linux to see if it works better - usually it should for older devices. I personally prefer Kubuntu. You can have dual-boot, or even boot from USB/DVD to try first.

That being said, if you have serious h/w issues, switching to Linux also won't help in the end...

[nakatago]

What they said but you can try a live disk/flashdrive first.

[Brah]

Thanks for the suggestions.

There's really no point in trying to fix anything on this PC, it will creak along until I get a new one, it's too old, I suspect structural issues that would cost more to fix than it is worth.

But the Chrome thing, is a curious one. I know browsers are not 100% dormant when pages are already loaded, but the amount of memory, CPU, and CPU time is pretty high.

When I now do is close all or most Chrome tabs at night, and no BSODs since.

[Strong Eagle]

Open the Chrome task manager... under More Tools... you'll get a list of all active pages and processes and their CPU usage... you might be able to ID a specific page.

Go to Chrome plugins... chrome://plugins/... very often you will see two entries for Adobe Flash player... both enabled. Disable the one with the path that contains 'PepperFlash'.

Disable the Java plugin... it's highly unlikely anything is using it, and if a page does want it, it will tell you. Disable any other plugins that you don't use.

[Brah]

The Chrome Task Manager I use, but interesting on what is installed, no PepperFlash, but I see other things I don't need and which I disabled.

I think the problems are related to the security software that came with my office remote client software.

[x9200]

Unfortunately I don't think there is any simple solution to such problems (other then expanding further your hardware). Linux won't help it neither. I have the same on an old P4 machine under ubuntu and on my Macbookair. From my experience browser eating resources related troubles just accumulate over its running time and closing this or that window may not necessary help (esp. some flash/java processes seem to get detached from the browser control or otherwise degenerate).

Once a week or so just close/kill the browser (always check with the task manager if it is really killed) and if you have it set to have the tabs/windows restored there will be a minimum harm after reopening.

Still, if you don't have the following plugins installed:
- a flash killer
- ad blocker
install them.
They will significantly limit the browser's resource appetite.