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Jimmy

Doomworld freezes my computer

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It's happened three times in the last two days now, and it (mysteriously) seems to occur randomly while loading up any page or thread on DW.

  • The tab in which I have Doomworld just stays loading, and then everything else in my IE7 window absolutely ceases to function - the other tabs, the minimize/exit buttons, everything.
  • Any programs I try to run (like ZDoom, mIRC or even Task Manager) won't load.
  • The icon menu in my taskbar becomes totally unresponsive (though everything on the left - including the start menu - still works).
  • Any popup context menus like those you get when you right click a bar in the taskbar stay up, sometimes until I reboot.
  • It stays frozen for about 5-10 minutes and then everything I've tried to do while it was frozen happens at once.
I really don't know what the problem could be here. Any light that could be shed on this would be appreciated.

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Jimmy91 said:

IE7

Problem identified. :p

More seriously, it must be some script from telefragged or ugo that is trying to rape your browser so that it will barf spywares all over your hard drives. Try disabling javascript. It's not like you need it for this site anyway.

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Gez said:

Problem identified. :p

Indeed. Revert to IE6 immediately, then get Maxthon Classic and kill all flash/java.

Bloodshedder said:

Try blocking banner.telefragged.com in your hosts file.

And this too.

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Lüt said:

Indeed. Revert to IE6 immediately, then get Maxthon Classic and kill all flash/java.


Aaaaalternatively, you can try Firefox with NoScript.

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Well, performance is an issue for me. I like having the 16 tabs I now have open simultaneously without the browser using over 50MB RAM for all of them, let alone one.

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Lüt said:

Well, performance is an issue for me. I like having the 16 tabs I now have open simultaneously without the browser using over 50MB RAM for all of them, let alone one.

Point. Modern browsers tend to be quite gluttonous.

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Speaking of Doomworld's ads, I got my first pop-up from this site. I was surprised because i thought that this site would be kinda anti-popup for some reason, don't ask why. Anybody else?

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Reverting to IE6 is a dumb plan unless you truly have an old computer. IE7 really is a better browser in so many ways. IE6 is even more vulnerable to things like broken plugins, weird hacks, busted scripts, etc. Things like Maxthon are thinly veiled wrappers for that garbage.

The ad scripts do sound somewhat suspicious simply because it's only on DW. The suggestions above are good ideas. It may even be enough to toast your history/cookies, etc.

If blocking the ad site or turning off Javascript don't help it I'd try running it with all the plugins disabled. Sometimes IE plugins die and fry the browser. If that fixes it the trick becomes to spend an hour narrowing down which one is broken. Broken plugins cause a lot of hell for IE (and even some for Firefox) but usually they affect lots of sites or just your entire ability to see the web.

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Ninjalah said:

Speaking of Doomworld's ads, I got my first pop-up from this site. I was surprised because i thought that this site would be kinda anti-popup for some reason, don't ask why. Anybody else?


That's the joke of the day. Come on, laugh, it's funny.

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I'd leave IE7 and install another modern 3rd party browser to use regularly. I do that with IE6 on this Windows 98 computer. It's on there just in case, but I use Firefox 2 regularly instead.

Lüt said:
kill all flash/java.

That's more trouble than it helps, as on some sites they do decent stuff. It's better to leave those on, block ads with adblock or the like, and not regularly visit any sites that abuse them.

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Telefragged needs to change to a more reliable ad host I think. One that doesn't get compromised with spyware every 3 months would be a good choice :P

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Quasar said:

Telefragged needs to change to a more reliable ad host I think. One that doesn't get compromised with spyware every 3 months would be a good choice :P


I hate the Doomworld ads. I remember once, every time I clicked a link on the forum, I got an add for "Mirrors".

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arrrgh said:

I use Chrome and It's pretty good resource-wise. No plugins though.

Yeah, I used Chrome recently on a low-resource PC (256 MB RAM, I think), and it was much better than Firefox with 10-20 tabs open, despite having similar (or higher) total memory usage. This is basically because Chrome uses a separate process for each tab, so when Windows swaps, it will swap out memory for inactive tabs (=processes) to make room for the active ones. With Firefox's single-process memory allocation, the memory used by various tabs gets mixed up, so there's swapping all over the place when memory runs low. (reference)

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Honestly, the only ad I've noticed is one at the veeeeeery bottom of the page, and it's usually flashblock'd for me.

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Yeah, I don't even bother with AdBlock. NoScript pretty much blocks everything, and what it doesn't, I can live with.

With doubleclick.net blocked, the only trace of ads I see on DW is a blank space at the top of the main page and the /idgames database.

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This problem is persisting, although now it's not always happening when browsing Doomworld. It can apparently happen with any application or at any given time, though I've yet been unable to root out the cause. :|

During this "freeze", the program that first experienced it (or perhaps started it) becomes totally unresponsive, and any other programs or dialog boxes just don't appear for about 5 minutes. For instance, iTunes won't load up when I click the shortcut on my desktop/quick launch bar, and Open/Save dialogs in SLumpEd (and NotePad and, well... pretty much anything else) don't pop up. :(

For the most part I can pretty much use my other open applications perfectly during this, providing I don't attempt to call up any dialog boxes. If I do try to, they also become unresponsive, until I wait long enough for my computer to become "unstuck", after which the tabs of the programs that suffered the freeze flash orange.

Has absolutely anyone experienced anything like this? As you may guess it is completely infuriating, as my computer is essentially crippled during this temporary state. Help is any form is majorly appreciated.

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I've been browsing Doomworld with Firefox and adblock and I haven't had a single problems with ads. You might want to consider trying that. Both of them are free.

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Jimmy91 said:
This problem is persisting, although now it's not always happening when browsing Doomworld.

You could install and run something like this. If there's an exploit running on your system it'll likely get caught by it.

Have you tried other browsers, by the way?

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Or you can use the hosts file trick on Windows, if you don't want to install any sort of shit:

It's found in C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc

just add the following lines to it:

127.0.0.1 mediamgr.ugo.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com

This blocked most, if not all of the DW popups. I had to do it because certain flash ads made it all but impossible to surf. Also PeerBlock has limelight networks in its block lists, go figure.

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Yeah, but if something, like adware or the like, managed to somehow get into the system, he'll need to wipe it out with something.

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