Most days I use my old Dell Dimension 2400 desktop computer running Windows XP. I have been using it for several years. At the beginning it gave me a lot of trouble, but then I got Firefox web browser and ZoneAlarm firewall installed and things went pretty smoothly. Until this year. Seems like ever since January rolled around things have been going wrong. Hangs, crashes, reboots. I reluctantly installed SP2 (Microsoft Service Pack 2) in order to manipulate some Microsoft files, and that seemed to aggravate the problem. Then it got to the point where if I tried to open more than four or five tabs in my browser, Firefox would crash. Microsoft always wants me to send them a bug report, but given Microsoft's reputation, I was beginning to suspect that they were looking for confirmation that their plan to make Firefox unusable was working. Alas, that was not the case and another fine conspiracy theory bites the dust.
But then Firefox got to be almost unusable. I even went and played with my Linux system for a bit. Finally, I broke down and ran a search and, surprise, surprise, my complaint is being echoed by thousands. Has anyone figured out what the problem is? Hmmm, some people are talking about AVG. Double click the AVG icon in my task bar and what's this? Linkscanner. The icon looks suspiciously like the green swirly thing that is showing up on my search results. Let's disable it. Oh, look, all my problems have gone away.
Of course, now I have a warning icon in my task bar. Oh no! What's the problem? I disabled link scanner. I don't think that's a problem, but evidently AVG thinks so. Bah.
Note about the pictures: Some of the pictures do not link to the source site for these programs: they didn't have the fine byte size logos on them. AVG's logo does link to their site, because they changed the color of the upper right square in their logo from black to blue, and none of the first couple of dozen images Google found had this new color scheme. So I had to copy, paste and crop the image from their website to get it right. It's the least I can do, AVG has served me well for many years.
The "green swirly thing" is actually two images, the first is a "working" icon which is eventually replaced by a green star. So I mentally combined the two into a "green swirly thing". These are GIF images which sometimes confuse blogger. GIF's are sometimes used for crude repetitive animations, in this case the spinning wheel. The spinning part doesn't show up here. Can't say as I am surprised.
Update December 2016 replaced missing pictures.
2 comments:
Thats exactly what I had to do. Just got a new computer with vista and here is me thinking its my computers fault. Until I thought about it and decided to turn off this little green thingy showing up beside all my search results. Im glad I did as well becasue Firefox was literally crashing all the time, for what I though was no apperent reason, unti lI guessed it had something to do with when I go onto google and search.
I do like AVG and have used it for many years but I definatly think its something they need to address.
Does anyone know if it just effect firefox or all browsers?
Don't know about other browsers. I changed from IE to Firefox several years ago due to a massive pop-up assault. Firefox works good enough, though I am starting to want some new features, though I don't know if they are even available anywhere. Self organizing bookmarks, and better history sorting mechanism would be my first choices. Meanwhile I make do.
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