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Gateway GP6-450 - Locks up on certain websites

K

KingPhil

Golden Member
We have several Gateway GP6-450 machines in my office here. On certain websites, these machines just lock up. The only way to get out of the lockup is to reboot the system. We've tried increasing the mouse buffer, which helps "sometimes". I find this to be a very strange problem. We might have narrowed the problem down to the scroll wheel, but that still isn't for sure. If anyone has an idea for me to try, or has experienced the same problem, please let me know.

Thanks!

~Phil
E-mail: pdhaberek@stearnswheler.com
 
Is it the same web site that locks up the machines or different web sites on different machines?
 
what os? me or 2000 or xp?

what browser (and version)? can you upgrade your browser?

if you think it's the scroll wheel on the mouse, is there a mouse driver upgrade available (what mouse?)

what website (if not internal)?
 
We're running Windows NT w/ SP6a.

Internet Explorer 6.0 ( I was hoping upgrading to that would fix it, but no)

I'll try these latest and greatest mouse drivers, but I just put 3.1 on there, and it didn't fix it :-(
 
Unless it's a standard, commercial site by a reputable company could be many things, including malicious redirection.

I believe that if you use Netscape Navigator you won't have this problem, but you will have others.

I think this is partly because of the way MS incorporates handling of Javascript or applets or even other types of non-MS scripting and especially advertisement POP-UPs. It also may have much to do with the security setting of IE for the internet zones (haven't tried this though). Many types of pop-ups will cause significant pauses in the IE current screen download/refresh.

Try browsing other sites while the particular IE screen is locked up or try installing a newer version of MS VM or try Netscape Navigator (with other problems) or test this particular site over again and verify that the screen never or eventually comes up (may take over a minute or two) and contact the website adminstrator for the site.
Also inform users to avoid 'browsing' non-professional websites with popups or get some popup disablers.
 
Check it out! It was a video card problem! I swapped video cards, and BAM, the problem went away. No matter what drivers I used with that card, it would still lock up the machine on certain sites. Now its fine with the new video card.

Thanks for all your help!
 
Since changing the video cards worked, setting video acceleration performance to a lower setting or even no acceleration probably also would have worked, without the extra cost of video cards.

But this sounds weird anyhow! After all, the video driver/dx drivers probably have some conflict with the browser displays. For example, if you set the video to VGA 256 colors, you should notice heavy dithering/pixelation in Windows, but IE will force the display into another mode when viewing websites.

Interesting indeed.
 
interesting...

what was the offending graphic card? and what driver was installed?

And as Justin said, have you tried adjusting some of the settings now that you know it's a video problem?

 
The problem video card is the Ensoniq 3d Banshee. But of course, Gateway put their little "spin" on it, so you can basically only use Gateways driver (which hasn't been updated since 1999). I've also tried turning off the acceleration completely, and it still didn't work.

This was a very weird problem. Lucky for us, we have plenty of older video cards lying around to fix this problem with. 🙂

Thanks again everyone!

~Phil
 
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