August 2009 – Absoblogginlutely!

I got a nice Acer 22” widescreen monitor at lunchtime today. Unfortunately I had to take back the 23” gateway monitor that just would not work. However the display on the Acer is stable and works great. I thought I would try my graphics card back in the computer too (I couldn’t get it to work with WindowsXP properly), so this evening I plugged it in, hooked up the new and my old monitor and now have a 1680*1050 and a 1280*1024 desktop. This is REALLY nice. Even with just the larger monitor I could browse the web and have notepad (or Live Writer) open next to a decent sized firefox window but now I am really spoilt. The only thing I have to work out is which screen should go where on the desk.

By using the dedicated card my System performance index has also gone from a whopping 1 (thanks to the lack of built in 3d graphics on the onboard vga controller) to an outstanding 2!

I went from 3.9,4.7,1.9,1,5.4 to 3.9,4.7,2.0,3.0,5.4

I can (if I really want) run the aero interface now. So far I’m not that impressed – the 3d flipping is painfully slow, but at least the aero peak functionality (the little icon to the far right of the taskbar now works). I do wish I could move this next to the start button though. Having said that, Windows-D still works to give me the same affect.

Ever since I updated the home computer to run the RTM version of Windows7 my gmail and greader experience has been very frustrating in Firefox. GReader just had no idea what data to display in the right hand side of the screen and gmail would just stick in the “please wait”, “loading” or “still working” status after sending an email (but would actually send the email).

Rebooting firefox into safe mode, or running ie8 worked fine so I knew it was not the computer but had to be an extension. Fortunately this was 100% reproducible so I was able to do some diagnostic tests.

I disabled all the likely culprits – flashblock, adblock,greasemonkey, better gmail, web developer, noscript but I still had the same problem. It wasn’t until I disabled the skype extension that the performance of google reader was back to normal and I could now send mail again. Seeing as though I only really use Skype to call my parents I don’t need the extension so it is now disabled. For some reason the uninstall button is disabled.

I did find a thread on the Google Help forums with the same solution which was nice to know that I wasn’t the only one with the problem and I came up with the same solution.

Month: August 2009

Extra screen goodness.

Firefox slow, especially gmail? – remove skype extension.