WTH = What the Heck, as this isn’t The Pit (although I thought about putting this there for a moment).
Bear with me for the background, if you will.
OK, so my mom’s not the most computer-savvy person. Neither am I, truth be told. But at least I know enough not to forward old internet chestnuts like the one about Bill Gates and the chairman of GM and if cars were made like PCs…
She sent me this one this morning, so I politely responded (she is my mom after all) about how it’s an old joke and how Snopes is a good place to go to learn about these internet stories. And I wanted to give her the URL for the Snopes page on this particular item, in the hopes that she’ll see the value in the site and learn to research this stuff for herself.
Twice I went to the page and twice paging down made my comuter crash (memory dump).
So the question is: Is it only my computer that does this?
Anyone else out there brave enough to try this site out and see if the same thing happens to them?
Is it an evil plot by MS programmers to keep us from seeing this “joke” at Bill’s expense?
It didn’t make my machine crash, but I did get the Google toolbar “A popup has been blocked” message, so maybe it’s something about the popup ads on that page that are causing you to crash? Just a theory.
I’m not even going to click on that link because I’ve also experienced the exact, same problem on Snopes, using Windows NT. It’s due to some horrific way they coded their pages and adverts that is linked to a horrific bug in IE that is linked to a horrific bug in Windows. So there’s lots of places to point the finger of blame.
I was never able to get NT to not blue screen on me on some pages, so I stopped going until I got to XP.
Why don’t you download the Google toolbar and make sure? If it doesn’t crash when you have it blocking popups, then stop it from blocking them and reload the page. If it crashes after the reload, then you can be pretty confident it’s the popup.
And the solution is easy; let the toolbar continue to block popups.
Well, I’m running NT, and Google Toolbar, and when I open that link, I still get a popup ad window, but our corporate censor -excuse me- filter blocks it’s contents.
No crashes.
And running NT isn’t anything to be embarrased about. If you are on NT, I guarantee you didn’t get the Sasser worm.
The guy in the next cube was running NT on an identical IBM NetVista machine as mine, and IT decided he needed an upgrade to XP. His machine was down for two weeks, while they figured out how to make it work. (No, they aren’t dummies, just used to doing clean installs and not upgrades.)
I decided I’ll keep using NT until they bring me a new box.
I’ve been having this problem too – only I’m running Opera 6 and Win2K Pro. No blue screen – just “Opera has encountered errors and will shut down.” Lately I’ve just been making sure to go to Snopes only when I don’t have any windows open that I want to keep.
I had this problem with IE on Windows NT as well. Not often-but any page that would crash it, would crash it every time I hit it. Freaking Blue Screen of Death ™.
I’m using Opera 7 on Windows XP now, and I’ve never had that problem. But there’s always a first time …
I will check shortly using IE & see if the result is the same.
[Bookmarks the "reply page & saves the text above to a TXT file]
[Checks]
Well, no problems noted, and IE actually seemed to block the pop-ups, too (I did once have the Google toolbar, but uninstalled it when I discovered that it seemed to act as a spyware-type program.)
NT with IE5 here. It loaded the page okay, then when I closed the Snopes window I discovered a popup window hiding in the background with a message box asking if I want ActiveX controls to run. My security settings (in Tools->Internet Options) are set so that it prompts me before running an ActiveX control. I promptly hit No and closed the popup window, and it didn’t crash. So that’s a possible solution.
FWIW, the strangest things can cause NT to BSOD - with me it’s MIDIs. :smack:
Just one clarification: the crash doesn’t happen when I go to the Snopes page, only when I page down towards the bottom. I just tried it again: went to the page, closed the pop-ups (Einstein & IQ something), waited a bit to make sure it wasn’t a time-related issue, then paged down and, sure enough, on the 4th hit of the “page down” button, BLINK! And memory dump.
I run Win2K with IE 6.0 & Norton Internet Security 2004.
I have the Norton ad blocking dialed up to max and most of the IE settings fairly moderate.
For me, often after I visit Snopes my browser quits working. No matter what URL I give it, the answer is always “DNS error or server not found”. I can ping & nslookup and … all over the net no problem, my email still works, but IE is dead, dead, dead. The only cure is a reboot. Just doing a logoff / logon won’t fix it.
Mind you, this only happens maybe 1/3rd of the time. Other times I can hit snopes pages all day with no weirdness at all.
I have another machine with NT , IE6 & Norton 2000. It never has a problem at snopes.
