So, le Roi Mangetout helped solve my last question, about why I was having trouble accessing the Web via my dad’s cable modem. So far so good, I can now get to the Straight Dope and other import places, check my email, etc. Sort of, anyway. Now the problem is that my laptop wants to (re) download all of the GIFs for various sites, including this one, and seems to stall out trying. (I’m posting from someone else’s computer). It may be something I did trying to sort out the first problem, or it could just be dumb luck synchronicity.
Any ideas why the graphics are suddenly downloading and getting stuck? Oh, and why are the Smilies all looking like they’ve suddenly seen a g-g-g-g-g-ghost?
Whatsamatter with youse guys? Are my questions too freakishly difficult? Computers too intimidating for you? Sheesh, not even one smart-alecky answer out there? I’m really disappointed in the lot of you!
It’s a Dell Latitude laptop with a 1.4G Pentum M processor. Has both a Broadcom 570x Gigabit integrated controller (for hard connections) and a Dell TrueMobile 1300 WLAN Mini-PCI card (for wireless connections). I’ve had the same problem with wireless, broadband (cable modem) and DSL connections. Browser is IE 6. It has at least 512 MB RAM, although it could be 1024.
Are you seeing web pages peppered with little red crosses where the images should be?
This happens to me sometimes and I never really got to the bottom of it, but it seemed to be partly caused by the fact that I was accessing the net through a proxy server, which was timing out before all the images were retrieved, plus it seems like the cache on the local machine and on the proxy server can sometimes get clogged up with what it thinks are cached objects, but are in fact zero-length files that appear as missing images - their presence can prevent the browser or proxy from trying to retrieve a fresh copy of the image.
Didn’t cure the problem, but for me, these steps helped a little:
Clear the temporary internet files folder.
If your ISP recommends using their proxy server, but doesn’t insist on it, don’t.
If you have some other kind of proxy set up (either a popup/ad blocker or a proxy server on a local network), see if it has any kind of cache function and clear the cache.
Yes, seeing the little “some image should go here but it’s not showing up” doohickeys. (That’s the technical term) Deleted my temp internet files, that didn’t help. Haven’t been able to locate any caching for my pop-up blockers and don’t know where to look for Proxy Servers these days. Oh, the OS is Windows XP, which is why I can’t find the Proxy Servers, I’m still learning to navigate this OS.
On the little “broken image link” icons (the red x doohickeys ), what happens if you right-click the red x and left click on “show picture”? If the picture immediately shows up, then there is probably some kind of latency/timeout issue going on. Could be a misconfigured connection (have you ever used any connection “optimizers” that are supposed to change certain connection settings so you are supposed to get the best speed possible for your type of connection?), a proxy setting that doesn’t need to be set (in Internet Explorer, go to Tools–>Internet Options. Click on the “Connections” tab. Click on the “LAN Settings…” button, and make sure none of the boxes are checked on that tab unless told otherwise by your ISP.
If, after doing the “show picture” bit two, three times in a row and no picture coming up, try to force a refresh of the page - hold down the Shift key while clicking the “Refresh” button on the toolbar. If there’s still no joy, go to Tools–>Internet Options, click on the Advanced tab, scroll down until you get to the “Multimedia” section, and make sure that “Show Pictures” is check marked.
I think my ISP or the WWW in general was having problems yesterday. I was getting an unusual amount of weirdness trying to access sites yesterday. It might be associated with the latest and greatest virus they announced, hard to say. I actually got some of the little red-x’s too, and that hardly ever happens with my ISP.
But in general, if a site gets “stuck”, I hit the re-load button, that usually works for me.
), what happens if you right-click the red x and left click on “show picture”? If the picture immediately shows up, then there is probably some kind of latency/timeout issue going on. Could be a misconfigured connection (have you ever used any connection “optimizers” that are supposed to change certain connection settings so you are supposed to get the best speed possible for your type of connection?), a proxy setting that doesn’t need to be set (in Internet Explorer, go to Tools–>Internet Options. Click on the “Connections” tab. Click on the “LAN Settings…” button, and make sure none of the boxes are checked on that tab unless told otherwise by your ISP.