I like to look at Imgur from time time to time. When you go to the page, there are many “thumbnails”(?) visible and you can scroll down to see more. As I scroll down, eventually the places where the thumbnails will be become blank with just a colored square background. As I continue to scoll and the blank spots are almost out of sight at the top, the thumbnail vid appears. If I scroll back up to see it it disappears again. When this is happening the PC starts making a lot of noise. Hard drive spinning? As soon as I leave the page the noise stops. Video card is NVIDIA Quadro 295. Windows 7. I know this is an older card but Imgur is the only site that it does this on. I don’t use the computer for video games. 99% browsing the web, YouTube etc. So is just he video card? On a 1-10, I’m about a 3 when it comes to tech stuff.
Speculation: The colored squares are placeholders while your browser downloads the thumbnails. They are loaded by a background script when you reach the bottom of a page. If you’re scrolling fast enough to outpace the colored squares, you’re scrolling faster than the script is supplying them. When you stop the script catches up, resulting in things on the screen jumping a little.
Dunno about the noise, could be anything. Possibly pages being written and retrieved from disk if you have little RAM. Possibly your network card. Possibly your video card, I guess.
~Max
Your browser (chrome/edge/firefox) will download and render the first page or three. As you scroll down the browser has to download and render the next images. As your mouse wheel picks up speed you find the limits of your internet connection (and the limit of what Imgur wants to give to you bandwidth-wise).
Your HDD spinning up is the result of your browser storing older cached images in longer term memory as it is making room for new images.
Your video card is most likely doing almost nothing during all this.
It’s probably not the video card. I’d suggest RAM–as you scroll down, it loads more and more thumbnails into RAM, but may not be properly freeing them (until you go to another page).
Try opening Task Manager by hitting Shift-Ctrl-Esc. I forget exactly what it looks like in Win7, but it should show a summary of CPU, memory, disk, network, etc. activity. RAM is the problem, it’s likely showing near 100% usage, and from there Windows will start using disk instead (and that activity should show up in Task Manager as well).
Both browsers and web pages have tended to get more bloated over time. 8 GB RAM is cutting it pretty close these days, even for just viewing one multimedia-heavy site at a time. Even 16 GB can feel tight at times.
As Max_S says, the colored rectangles are placeholders. I can see them if I scroll really fast on Imgur, but if I stop the squares fill in in about a second. I have a pretty beefy system, though. If you’re out of memory, the squares may never fill in, or do so very slowly.
Thanks. I’ll check out my RAM. I know that was a problem before I got the current PC (which was a few years ago). Also, its Windows 10 Pro but I guess that isn’t the problem,
Hard drive reading/writing.
Aside from the various fans and optical drive, it’s the only whirly mechanical bit in a computer that can make noticeable noise.
Do you use an adblocker? On a computer like that, I would consider it essential to avoid your computer slowing down as things load. You want it to only load the actual page you are on, not all the ads and scripts the ads need to function.
Ad blocker in use - AdBlock Plus. Only 6GB RAM might be the problem.
Definitely follow Dr.Strangelove’s advice. Task Manager is basically an EKG of your hardware. Open it up, click the “Performance” tab. Note the line graphs in the left column. What you are looking at is a baseline. It’s normal for ethernet (or wifi if you are using it) to be jumpy. Minimize Task Manager and do your experiment on Imgur. As soon as weird things start happening, maximize Task Manager again and look at the data.
If your problem is too little RAM, you’ll see memory and disk going off the charts but not CPU or GPU.
~Max