TCS - Has Your Web Surfing Seemed Slower?

Has Your Web Surfing Seemed Slower?

by Ira Wilsker
Golden Triangle PC Club
From the July 2003 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

Recently, I found that my Internet access seemed sluggish, with pages loading more slowly then usual. I also had some other problems, which I have not had in the past, such as errors when burning CDs, or lockups when loading a recorded CD, or viewing multimedia files. I would now also sometimes get a “blue screen of death”, the infamous blue window telling me that “IEXPLORE caused an invalid page fault”, which often required a reboot to clear the locked computer. Other errors that occurred were “This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down”, “Rundll32 caused an invalid page fault in module Unknown at 0000”, and other similar errors.

To try and solve the problem, I reviewed any changes I had made to my machine. I had not recently added any new hardware. Diagnostics on my Internet connection showed a typical connection speed and throughput, so that was not the problem. Scandisk showed no hard drive errors, and there was no significant disk fragmentation to hinder performance. Other then daily updates, I was using the same version antivirus as usual. I ran an online virus scan at housecall.antivirus.com just to see if a virus or Trojan had slipped by my antivirus software between updates, and my computer was free of viruses and Trojans, either of which could have caused the problems. I updated and ran my favorite spyware checker, Spybot Search and Destroy, available for free from its website at spybot.safer-networking.de and it found a new “browser helper” called “New.Net” had somehow been installed recently. This spyware is somewhat benign, downloading and installing its updates silently in the background, while enabling access to non-standard, upper-level Internet domains. I allowed Spybot to remove the New.Net files from my computer.

Some quick online research on New.Net uncovered several interesting tidbits about this pest. Microsoft recently (June 4) posted a Knowledge Base article about New.Net, labeled KB302463, which described many of my problems exactly. Microsoft told about the problems with New.Net, and how to resolve them. The support section of another excellent spyware killer, PestPatrol, available from www.pestpatrol.com, indicates that New.Net has been known to crash Internet Explorer regularly.

About the only new software I had installed recently was the latest version of RealOne, the popular free multimedia player that I had downloaded from Real Networks, www.real.com. I had been trying to manipulate some unusual audio formats, and the new version of RealOne was listed as being capable, so I downloaded it and installed it. It was shortly after installing RealOne that I started having trouble web surfing and burning CDs. According to PestPatrol, RealOne is one of many programs that installs New.Net.

Looking up RealOne issues on the search engine Alltheweb, I found many references to problems similar to mine, and that the effective way to resolve the conflicts was to also remove RealOne from the computer. RealOne, in addition to being a comprehensive multimedia player also tries to read or write any CD inserted, as well as intercepts “calls” for other multimedia functions. According to the reports, this can cause the sluggish performance issues I encountered. I uninstalled RealOne using Microsoft’s integral uninstall function by clicking on My Computer – Control Panel – Add/Remove Programs, clicking on RealOne, and uninstalling it. Almost immediately, my performance improved to where it was prior to the installation of RealOne, and my lockups and page faults were gone.

I was now back to my original need for a full-functioned multimedia utility. I have Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, but I do not use it because of some of the performance and privacy issues associated with it. The need was promptly satisfied by downloading the latest version of a small (800k), excellent, free utility discussed previously in this column, Irfan View, written by a Bosnian computer science student. Available for download at www.irfanview.com, this small program has enormous capabilities. If the optional “plug-ins” are installed, Irfan View can play or manipulate virtually any multimedia format, including images, audio, and video. Streaming media, including real player format, QuickTime, and other video formats are also supported with the available plug-ins. I recommend that Irfan View be installed, and then the Irfan file “ALL Plug-Ins” be downloaded and installed.

Now, I can play my streaming formats without the degradation in performance I had with RealOne. Irfan View is written in tight code, which utilizes fewer resources such as memory and processor time, than its larger competitors.

If you are having similar sluggish performance while surfing the net, playing or burning CDs, or using streaming media, consider removing RealOne, and using Irfan View with its plug-ins. Also scan for viruses and spyware, as I did, and run Scandisk and Defrag. While not a cure-all for performance problems, this might be an easy solution for many of the problems that “we” are having.

Happy and safe computing!



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Tulsa Computer Society 7/01/2003
Don Singleton, President