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So I suddenly had a tab open on its own for too game Empire on my Firefox. I changed the setting so it would delete my browser history. Closed and reopened. Except Firefox only shows under process. And my CPU usage shoots up to 100. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling. IE is slow. Norton quick scan shows nothing.

I restarted. Nothing. I end process. Wait. And it still won't open. The only thing I haven't done is to set the computer back to a backup date. Any ideas?


I had to restart for Norton (and that whole issue). Firefox, magically, started the whole "which add-ons would you like" thing and now works like it should. Ironically also tells me it is out of date... when I just reinstalled it on the 6th... Hahaha, funny. But I will take it to a professional to have it looked at for viruses, and such to ensure that my computer is in proper working order. ^_^

How old is the computer?

Have you ever cleared out the cache for firefox?

I bought the computer 2008 Jan. But I never got it until June (it was a graduation gift). I've had Firefox since about May of last year or the year before.

I have cleared the cache before. I actually told it to do that every time I closed out, and that's when it wouldn't reopen. =/

When I removed wajam from the accidental addition during reinstalling, it pulled up a Firefox browser. I haven't' closed it since because I know I won't be able to get it up again. I Know I'll probably have to take it in somewhere. I did a full system Norton scan, came back that nothing was infecting me.

That is odd.......with that it sounds like some of the files got corrupted with the settings. Have you tried resetting your settings to default or something before this started happening?

I noticed some of my settings weren't what I had, and changed them back to it. That's when that all started. But the only reason I checked all of this was because I would randomly have a tab open for "Goodgames Empire" to which I had never heard of prior to this.

I also tried to set it back to a previous date only to find that it had no back up files at all..... I've had the computer 5 years. I've done it before (when IE had an update that I REALLY hated, so I set my computer back a few days).

That is.....wow. Well, a test for if it's Mozilla itself would be to create an alternate user on the computer then trying Mozilla on that account.

It could be malware, but there are so many things that could go wrong, there's no telling sometimes.....

o_o this is why I decided I should go to someone to have it looked at. I'm not sure I want to take it to work (Staples), but I'm trying to find someone who is reliable and such around here.

If you still have any kind of service plan or warranty on it, I'd take it to them. Otherwise.....big chain wise, I can state from experience that Best Buy's Geek Squad does good work most of the time. Local places can certainly be quite good as well.

My computer is 5 years old... There is no service plan or warranty. Our Best Buy is shitty.

i've been looking at a few local places. We have a Net2000 that is the only one that has a review locally. One review, two years ago. The others don't. One has a free diagnosis, and really good prices.

It could be a virus/worm thing.

Cause I had one that was eating up 50% of my RAM (I have 4 gigs)

Can you open Windows Task Manager and see what's eating up CPU? Because if it is what happened to me, there will be something with a name extremely close to something that should be running but eating CPU. End that process if that's happening.

Then if IE works then, use this http://www.microsoft.com/security/sc...s/default.aspx

It is free, will catch and get rid of worms (if you do a full scan) and it's good for 10 days before you have to re-download (due to updates and everything)

It's the best thing if it isn't like a file being corrupted. And Norton is horrible from my experience-kills computer speed even when not running a scan. I suggest AVG which comes in a free edition. But that's just me.

What's odd is my CPU usageis only up when I'm using the firefox browser. I'm thinking it'd be better to go to someone ._. I hate to download anything right now because the last time I did something like that, my computer failed. It was a Dell, but I hate risking it >_> I can't warranty myself.

If you look at physical memory, I'm up to 56% in use, but I'm running AIM (49k), FIrefox(159-162k), Various other things to run the computer, all shifting.

Physical memory isn't what you need to worry about. I use about 70% of mine.

It's CPU that you need to worry about. Mine never gets to 50% or higher that I've noticed except when running Diablo 3.

Oddly mine goes anywhere between 15 and 100. o_o Depends what I'm doing I guess. I also only have 2 GB RAM.... My computer, like I said is 5 years old.

Physical RAM *is* a big deal, and CPU load *isn't* until you hit 100% on a core.

If you run out of physical RAM, your system has to use your hard drive as additional RAM. Now, if you've got some memory-hungry program in the background not doing anything, the OS knows to stick that program in the slow disk-as-RAM region (known as "swap space") until you start doing something with it.

But if Firefox is hogging RAM and it's trying to do something, if it tries to pull more physical RAM than you have available, it's going to start "thrashing" -- that means that the operating system will be switching stuff from physical RAM to disk and back because data in swap space can't be used by programs.

Once it starts thrashing, it's basically game over. Sometimes if it's not thrashing too bad you can just wait it out, but if your disk is sitting there churning hard for more than a few minutes it could take a process that normally only runs for a few seconds not finish after several hours. (Anecdote: One time I tried building a large program on a computer with 1GB of RAM. On my laptop (4GB) it took about 45 minutes. On the other computer, I had to kill it after two days of not reporting any change in progress.)

As for CPU time, if all of your CPU cores are at less than 100%, it means that your computer is spending time doing nothing at all -- it even lowers the electrical power to the CPU, because you just don't need it. Theoretically you shouldn't really even see a difference in performance between 25% and 75% CPU usage. Once one of your CPU cores hits 100%, then the program running on that core can't go any faster or do any more work, but other programs can run on other cores. Once ALL of your cores hit 100%, then NOTHING can go any faster or do any more work and trying to do more requires taking time away from something else.

Edit: With a five-year-old computer, there's an off chance you may only HAVE one core but I think by 2008 most new computers were shipping with two.

o_o I'm going to say I think i understand all of this.

My CPU usage right now is about 10 to 25 percent. I'm running sidebar, AIM, MSN, Firefox, and probably some other things. (and as I typed this jumped up to 100, and Norton says something about checking stuff).
My physical memory was 49, now 52, but still hasn't reached very high.

I don't know how many cores i have. I have AMD Turion 64x2. Or so says the sticker still on my computer (Yes I really still have the sticker, though this year it has been slowly losing the clear cover on it).