Forum: Lost Stories

Well, if you are running Win11 you will get lots of chance to reboot due to updates. I'm on my second or third one in the last couple of days.

I was going to pt a post up about really slow screen refreshes but I'm going to wait because I think the pending update had something to do with it. We'll see.

Win10 did updates Wednesday and Friday.

if you are running Win11

Wash your keyboard out with soap! Win11 would take one look at this machine and go 'Nope': Single core Celeron, just 2GB ram including video buffers, 2007 BIOS. Runs the Ubuntu respin I'm using fine; gets slow doing a deep search into overfull directories (>2k files), but then Windows just flat failed at that, becoming unusable much above 1k files and BSoDing when I tried something with 4k files in a directory (Recovery: boot into a linux live CD, split up the directory, reboot into Windows). Worst problem I had on this one was when I inadvertently moved every chapter of every story I had ever saved into a single directory, nearly 200k files, took a week to get back to usable state. Worst MS problem I had was at work: overnight update bricked it; live CD revealed that windows update was continuously growing a directory it used for rollback files, which grew to a point that there wasn't room to download the update. Funnest problem I've had with MSdos was on my first XP clone; to get a few % speedup, I'd reduce the refresh rate by using debug to o 41 40 (change the timer driving the DMA doing the refresh to a longer period), but one day I missed one of the 4s and did o 41 0, which triggered a refresh cycle as soon after each finished as possible; MSDOS (3) still seemed to be running but slow, so I did a dir and dos ground away for about 10mins before coming up with the best error message I've seen: Out of paper error writing drive A

but then Windows just flat failed at that, becoming unusable much above 1k files and BSoDing when I tried something with 4k files in a directory

I've a laptop, originally with win10, actually running Win11 with a directory containing 20,225 files - total size 117 GB - with no problems accessing it or browsing through the pictures using Explorer set to show extra large icons.
No problems accessing directories containing more than 25,000 files on an external USB drive. I migrated from DOS/WfW3.1 to NT3.51 back then when it was released and to the NTFS file system which had no problems with huge files.
The only problem with files I ever encountered with Windows was trying to copy – for backup/archiving – tons of small files (less than 1KB each) produced in an industrial process. It took more than ten times longer than copying fewer but larger files of the same total size.

Windows doesn't work well with a WD MyCloud Mirror system I have. Don't know who is the culprit, but copying thousands of files to and fro my Windows machines and the WD MyCloud unit takes eons. The more files I select for copying the slower each file gets copied. So it's obviously not the Gigabit Ethernet I use. Selecting only 100 files each for copying, but starting 8 copy-processes concurrently is still faster than copying 800 files in one copy-process!

HM.

Do you not terminate Firefox except when you reboot?
As an alternative to terminating and restarting FF, try about:memory in the address bar and then clicking on the "free memory" option.

Do you not terminate Firefox except when you reboot?

I'd prefer that, but Ffx grows the memory it used, including cache, probably badly fragmenting it and becoming painfully slow, so I find I need to restart Ffx about once a month (but recently much more often). I finish up rebooting about every 3-4 months - I Hate having to reboot as it takes hours to get all the windows and batch files back in their correct places on the correct workspaces, and I usually miss something. The memory stuff in Ffx doesn't (seem to) have any noticeable effect on slowness; I'd be tempted to kill & restart Ffx more frequently, except that the restore option never seems to bring recent stuff back if Ffx has been running a while.

As far as I can remember, my relevant Firefox settings are:
Startup
- Open previous windows and tabs

Privacy and Security
- Remember browsing and download history
- Remember search and form history
- Clear history when Firefox closes
("history" is only "Temporary cached files and pages")

When I first position to a tab, it sometimes takes a while (up to 20 seconds) for it to open but I can do "other things" - even within that Firefox window - while waiting for it to complete.

I close my system down altogether every night, but I'll often close Firefox windows just to unclutter things when I'm not actually using that window. That does not apply to the default window, that one normally stays open unless I'm closing FF down for the night. One of the tabs in that window is about:profiles.