My Windows PC has been doing this for a couple of months, and it seems to be getting worse. It seems to have to do with screens where I have to log in, specifically getting to the login screen not waiting to actually log in once my password is in.
What happens is that the browser freezes, and then as time ticks by, the whole computer freezes until whatever it is resolves itself, and things go on normally. It seems to be getting worse in that the delay seems to be getting longer, until now it is 5 minutes and up.
It only seems to do this with Chrome. I tried the same sites with Firefox, and didn’t have any problem.
I have run a scan with my anti-virus software and it didn’t turn up anything. The biggest offender that happens every time is my credit union; other sites seem to be hit or miss, but when it does happen, it always seems to be connected to getting to the login screen. I have whitelisted the credit union on my ad blocker and on my anti-tracking software, which didn’t help, I have re-booted, of course, more than once. I have deleted cookies and browser history a couple of times. None of this has helped.
I thought about re-installing Chrome; I don’t seem to be able to find how to do that except by deleting it and then re-installing it, and I don’t want to lose all my settings if I can avoid it. If that’s the only way, I’ll do it, but I’d like to make that a last resort.
Off the top of my head…
Chrome is a notorious resource hog, memorywise. How much RAM do you have, and how much is it using? You can bring up Task Manager* and have a look.
If it looks like that may be the problem, you’ve got the choice of adding more RAM, or switching browsers to…practically any other one. Edge, Firefox, Brave are all ‘lighter’ than Chrome.
*right-click on the Taskbar and select Task Manager, assuming you’re running Windows 10.
Windows 8.1. I’ve had this laptop for, well, I forget exactly how long, and I’ve been using Chrome for maybe 3-4 years (somewhere on here is a thread where I asked what to do about my IE behaving badly, and I was advised to get rid of it, so I did). I have 6GB of RAM.
Anyway, Task Manager shows something that might be interesting. Chrome has 13 background processes going on, all of them eating up 5 MB to 91 MB of memory. So I’m going to close Chrome, and stop each of those 13 processes, to see what happens. Wish me luck.
Well, as you probably knew, all those processes stopped along with the app, and started right up again when I started Chrome. So I closed it, and opened Firefox, to compare. Firefox only has 4 background processes, although 2 of them are pretty big, but the total is less than Chrome.
What I don’t understand is how I was able to use Chrome for 3-4 years without a problem, and then this started recently. It coincided pretty closely with a pretty radical change on my credit union’s website, which they deny could be causing the problem since I can log in using Firefox without a problem. All of this confuses me.
The other thing that confuses me is, if this is a memory issue, why does it only manifest itself in cases where I am trying to get to a login screen? It feels like something is running in the background that is taking up all the resources, but I’m blessed if I can see it.
Right now, just typing this post, I am running with 59% of memory in use. When I had Chrome open, I was only using 51% of memory. And now Firefox has added a 5th process.
H’m. For comparison, I’ve got this open in Edge - it’s using 310MB in 10 processes as I write this, with one tab open.
6GB of RAM is what I’d consider on the low side, these days. I tend to go for 8GB minimum lately, though many people’s mileage may vary. Depending on the laptop, and the availability of RAM for it, it may or may not be viable to bump it up some.
FWIW, I’ve become a fan of Edge. Same engine, same extensions available, and noticeably lighter.
Really outside of my field, but I’ve noticed some websites are just slow - badly coded perhaps, or have other security things going on. Maybe that’s what happened to your credit union website; they made some changes that really make it chug.
Also, Firefox uses a different engine than Chrome or Edge; Firefox uses Gecko, I see, while both Chrome and Edge are based on Chromium.
There are a couple things you can try. First off, try opening the site in Incognito mode. Click the three dot button and choose “New Incognito Window” and then use that to go the site, and see if you have the same problem
The second is Guest Mode. Click the little icon to the left of the three dots. Down in the Other People section, click Guest. This will open up a Guest Window, which will not have any of the settings from your profile at all. You can then see if the problem occurs there.
I’d also like to request that you link the site that’s causing the problem, especially if none of the above works. I’d like to see if I have the same problem using Chrome.
(I have encountered one site in the past that causes problems like this. It was due to loading too many images. I’ve also had an issue where an extension interacted badly with a site and caused it the tab to use up tons of CPU, though I was usually still able to close the tab.)
Without knowing anything else, if it’s not configuration (virus, updates, addins, incognito, guest) or Memory, it’s DNS. Because it’s always memory, or, if not, DNS.
Things you can do about DNS: Change DNS setting. Disable wireless. Disable VPN. Disable Chrome DNS cache:
Press F12 (or Ctrl+Shift+I) to call up the DevTools.
Thank you for the suggestions. Unfortunately, neither of these resolved the problem; the wait time was shorter for the Guest Window approach, just over a minute; about 2.5 minutes for the Incognito mode. I will send you a PM with the URL if you want to experiment.
Thank you for the suggestions. I would like to know more than I do (which is virtually nothing) about what effect these changes would have on the rest of my browser experience before I implement them.
The effect of these tests is to see if your browser is attempting to use a dead-end for routing (particularly for routing DNS). If your only network connection is wireless or a VPN, then disabling wireless or the VPN will kill your internet connection.
Disabling the Chrome DNS cache should have no effect at all. DNS caching is supposed to be a small optimization that you never notice at all: if you notice a difference, something is wrong.
To be clear, those options could temporarily kill your Internet connection until you turn them back on.
Though, if @Roderick_Femm doesn’t know what those things mean, then I find it likely he also doesn’t know how to disable them. But instead of giving directions right away, I’ll ask a few questions.
Are you connected to the Internet over with a cord, or via Wi-fi?
Is the computer yours, or provided by a company?
If the former, have you ever been told to install a VPN, or given it to your employer to install something?
Have you ever installed a VPN for any other reason?
If, as I suspect, this is just a personal computer with no VPN, there’s no point in looking into that option. And, if he’s connected via Wi-fi, disabling it won’t help. If he’s connected with a wire, turning of Wi-fi might be useful.
I also don’t think DNS is the problem given the symptoms experienced. DNS issues wouldn’t cause anything to freeze.
I did a small amount of reading, and have some idea of what DNS is about now. I followed the instructions far enough that I could see the “disable DNS” check box, although I did not do so.
From what you’ve said - especially the fact that Firefox isn’t giving you issues on login websites - it looks like Chrome is the culprit to me. That can be worked around fairly simply; just open those few (one?) websites in Firefox. Bit of a pain, but…
Another thought occurred to me, given that it’s an Old Laptop - how hot is it running? Do you hear fans kicking in at certain points, really winding up at others, or is it usually mostly quiet? Overheating can cause a comp to freeze. Nothing you’ve said, other than the freezing, leads me to suspect that, but it’s a possible cause of the comp locking up.
There are programs you can install to check the CPU temp (among other stats) - I use HWiNFO, and have used SpeedFan. Quick internet search will lead you to them. If your computer sounds like a jet engine at times, or (almost as worrying) is always silent, you might want to give it a go. As I say, I don’t think that’s the problem, but it might be.
Okay, since you use a cable, it wouldn’t hurt to try disabling wifi, as it won’t do anything to your Internet connection, and it’s not impossible that there is something weird goin on with it. Ideally your laptop would have a switch that would disable wifi, but I don’t think modern laptops tend to have that. Still, looking for it wouldn’t matter.
That said, that is unlikely to be the issue, so I’ll recommend somethi g else to try first. Try disabling hardware acceleration. Just go into settings and then type accel and try unchecking “Use hardware acceleration if available.” Then, just for good measure, restart Chrome, and then try out the problematic website.
This is one of the few settings I can think of that would persist in Guest mode, and GPU issues can cause freezes, so this is worth trying before going further.
Note that, if this works, it’s probably not going to be the final fix, so keep checking back in.
I would delete the Chrome cache and see if that helps.
If it doesn’t, I would switch to Slimjet, which is Chromium based, but uses far less memory.
You should be able to import all your bookmarks, etc. from Chrome with no problem, but you will need to reinstall extensions. Slimjet also comes with a built-in ad-blocker and default privacy settings.
Wifi is not enabled in the computer (it is enabled in the router for my tablet).
I don’t mind trying this I guess, it seems like any other browser would probably fix the problem. I’m curious about how important the browser engine is. I picked Chrome because I had tried Firefox and didn’t like it much, and Chrome seemed OK up to now, but I haven’t tried any others.
That was about the first thing I tried, before I started this thread, on instructions from the credit union tech person. I tried it again for grins. No joy from that either time.
This did not work out well. I downloaded the browser and installed it. When I started it up, it just hung the whole computer. I let it crank for 15 minutes or so before I stopped it. I did this twice, in case the first time was a fluke.
I really appreciate all the suggestions and willingness to help, but I think I’m going to set this problem aside for a while and just live with it for a bit. Maybe I will try re-installing Chrome. Maybe I will buy a new computer (it’s probably time anyway, this one is 5-6 years old). Maybe I won’t do anything. But thanks to those who tried.
You’re just a step or two from the extent of the help I can provide. So I’ll go ahead and post what I was going to post, and you can look at this later if/when you want to try. (Also, please at least read the last paragraph now).
The next step was just going to be reinstalling Chrome, but without uninstalling it first. This won’t remove any of your stuff at all.
If that didn’t work, then next is to completely uninstall Chrome. In order not to lose your settings, you can sign into Google and set up Sync. Then you can reinstall Chrome and sign back into Google, and it will offer to sync. Sync what you need, and not the rest.
If that didn’t help, the only thing left would be to reinstall Windows. You could at least try it out with a separate partition.
I’m a bit concerned that you had trouble installing a new browser. It makes me wonder if there’s a hardware problem, like something going wrong with your disk or memory. If so, more problems will probably show up, even if you try to avoid the issues for now. I hope that isn’t the case. I wish you well.
The situation appears to be resolved, although there are still things I need to do.
I decided finally to ditch (uninstall) my virus protection program and to rely on Windows Defender instead. It took some hours to uninstall and especially to update all my Windows files and re-start the two or three times it took before things were operating normally. Now everything on Chrome is responding quickly and smoothly, including my credit union site.
Being somewhat hubristic after this success I tried to run a full scan of the computer using Windows Defender, but it ran overnight, well over 9 hours, and it was only maybe 5% done, so I canceled that scan. I’m not sure if it was actually stuck, or just very thorough. Tonight I will try a “quick” scan, and see how that goes.
Thanks again to everyone who was so helpful and patient with my little problem.
I am becoming convinced there is a hardware issue. Yesterday everything was working fine, today everything that seems to call to the hard drive (or anyway isn’t already in active memory) is hanging, every step takes several minutes while the application says “not responding” and then it comes back and completes that step.
I asked the system to check the C: drive and it says nothing is wrong. I see that the D: drive partition, the recovery files, is over 90% full. Could that be the problem? If so, is it something I can fix myself? I can follow instructions, even for something as esoteric as re-partitioning a drive. I am on Windows 8.1.