Calling all computer experts

reply to post by sean


I'm running windows vista home premium on a HP pavilion. It's over five years old.

reply to post by Skid Mark


Drivers site...www8.hp.com... Once you're at that website there is a button there that it downloads a temporary program to detect what PC or hardware you have. I know you mentioned HP Pavilion, but there could be a dozen more models numbers. Or you can search for HP product number, should be a sticker on the back of the machine. Don't get the OS product key mixed up with the machines product number they're two different things.

You should download Speccy and Belarc Adviser and take a look at those first. You'll get a print out of just how old the drivers are by their dates and versions etc, then you can match them with the ones in the database that are recent. There could be bios, nic card, video card, sound card updates who knows if it's been 5 years then they probably do got updates for it. As far as software problems goes it's usually .net framework that's the culprit. Especially if software breaks right after a update was downloaded. If you download a program that requires .net 4.5 and you're still on 3.5 then things are going to start going bad from the start. lol There is also the case of upgrading 4.5 from 3.5 and your legacy software and drivers go bonkers. That would be the first thing to check and secondly lots of stuff runs off of java. Sun systems java update is now like version 7.

The problems with Java updates is that the new stuff will require J7 and J7 uninstalls J6 which had people screaming as it instantly killed all the legacy J6 apps. According to them you should be able to install both side by side. Moreover, there was other issues with the settings in control panel that if you installed 64bit it would overwrite the 32bit, I was the one that sent in the original bug report about that to them. It seems they have created a control that allows control over both and you can set which browser has which version of java running on it. So essentially you can have two browsers, one running J6 32bit legacy things and another browser for 32bit/64bit J7. Firefox hasn't officially released 64bit. IE has a 32bit/64bit. Chrome may or may not have it I don't use Chrome because of the lacking security features that should of been built in it's platform since day one.

Here's a cool download site on 64bit apps. www.x64bitdownload.com...

Oh by the way you can get some useful basic system information by typing systeminfo in cmd, but it isn't as detailed as the other speccy or belarc advisor programs. As an example systeminfo it'll show ram amount but doesn't show the brand of ram or which slot it's installed in.

reply to post by sean


Thanks a lot. I'm going to check it out.

The reason for freeze and crash is firefox's new settings which caches everything in RAM and eat's up all the resources of your computer. Disable these settings by this method and let me know if that works for you.

Step 1: Type about:config in address bar and accept the warning.

Step 2 : Scroll to

1. "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers" and set the value to "0"

This ensures nothing is cached into ram, thus saving ur ram and cpu.

2. "browser.sessionhistory.max_total_entries" ="5"

The value will decide how many times u can go back, if it 0 no page will be saved and you cannot navigate to earlier webpage by pressing back button. Value 5 will let u go back 5 webpages, choose according to your usage.