technola

[Note: Before I start on this post, your IT Department has asked me to say a little something. If your computer is really slow, check with them before you do anything. You can break things by doing what I did. This can make them very angry and frustrated and want to cry. Your IT colleagues have enough things in their day that do this to them. Don't be another one. And remember, IT staff are like secretaries and administrative assistants. Your work day goes smoother when you are nice to them.]

I’m not a fanatic memory manager; however, tonight, in order to use my computer, I had to learn a little about reigning in some hoggish use of memory.

Let me set the stage. I restarted my computer, and within minutes, it was incredibly slow. I wasn’t doing anything complicated. I was just trying to make train reservations for my next trip to NYC. Only Outlook and FireFox were open, and a few more items were running in the background. Following my gut instinct, I first blamed Outlook, which typically uses more than its fair share of my memory, but its CPU and memory usage were low. A bit disappointed that the problem wasn’t quite so easy to pinpoint, I turned toward the next set of likely culprits — the three software programs that I had installed recently: AVG Anti-Virus 8.0, Firefox 3, and Xobni. Turns out that two of three were responsible for my problem: AVG Anti-Virus and Firefox.

Recently, AVG Anti-Virus 8.0 was released with a new feature, ACG Safe Search. This feature works with your browser and scans every web link to find out if it is good or bad. And it is a known memory hog. So I said good-bye to AVG Safe Search. I certainly I won’t miss it. (Don’t worry, Allison. AVG Anti-Virus is still installed.)

In doing my research on AVG Safe Search, I found out that memory management was a particular focus for the developers working on Firefox 3; however, a few default settings still seem to cause Firefox to consume more resources than necessary. While there are several places that you can read up on this, I would recommend the Internet Duct Tape blog and the mozillaZine article, “Reducing Memory Usage.” I ended up changing some of Firefox’s default settings, which has seemed to improve things. I’m going to stick with these settings for a couple of days and see what happens.

So as of tonight, my computer is much happier, and I’ve been able to make my train reservations. The best news? I was also able to get reservations for cheap at The Pod Hotel, my favorite NYC resting place. - K