The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Hi -

I know this isn't music related, but the guidelines don't say it has to be... and, hey, if I could solve this problem, it would enhance my ability to steal pictures with which to create cover art...

On my Windows XP system, whenever I do a "Save As" to save an image file from a webpage, the saving becomes incredibly slow - even if the image is on the local machine. I had seen this with Netscape and MSIE; I just installed Firefox and trying to save an image from Firefox basically brings the browser to a dead stop ("application is not responding"). Even a tiny image, like an avatar from the message boards, is noticeable slow at saving.

I've gone into Norton AntiVirus and removed "JPG" from the list of file types to scan automatically, with no effect.

Any thoughts? big .mp3 files can be saved without loading down the system, it seems to be specifically related to IMAGE files, and I think it's actually worse when the image is on the local machine...

Thanks,
Charles

I have no problems on XP related to saving images from Firefox. Is your network acting up?

What is this MSIE you speak of? Must be some privative, standards-breaking proprietary browser.

CWShredder

Hijack This

CCleaner

Adaware and Spybot your machine.

CWShredder will ensure that your browser isn't compromised in some way. Hijack This will do the same thing and more. CCleaner will clear out all the little caches and things that clog your computer and slow it down.

Run everything in that order and see if that helps.

Hey -

I had run Sober's suggested programs above and hadn't solved the problem. (Thanks for the suggestions, though, I did download the freebie programs you suggested).

Today I went poking around the Mozilla site and I think the problem is solved.

There is a file called "downloads.rdf" which is a log of all the files you've downloaded in the past. If it becomes very large (they don't say what "very large" means, but mine was 7 megabytes in size or so), it can make for some very slow downloads while Firefox adds a new log entry. The suggested fix is to either clear out that file through the Tools menu (trying that again brought Firefox to its knees) or just going in and deleting the file.

Deleting the file seemed to do the trick, although I had to poke around to find the copy of the file that was causing the problem... there was a "default" version of the file (that I think Mozilla pulled in from my old Netscape data) and a local user version, both files were about 7 mb in size, and the problem didn't go away 'til I had deleted both of them (though it may have just been that the first one I deleted wasn't the one causing the problem).

Umm, anyway, very slow file downloads in Mozilla, my problem turned out to be a bloated downloads.rdf file. Images from the internet and from the local machine both now download very quickly. I probably wasn't seeing a similar problem in MSIE because I don't use it that much...

Charles

Oh, great - I admit that problem was perplexing... glad you found it! Hopefully this thread remains visible via google
-bill

I second this. My firefox at home, always seem to choke when rendering images... it could be related to this.

Another thing that will slow down saving images is if you save them all into the same folder and have your folder view set to Thumbnail... for me at least, it seems to try and re-cache the thumbs.db file every time. It improved quite a bit when I got a dual-core AMD64, not sure if XP is smart enough to thread services correctly or not, or if it's just a better/faster CPU than I had before, but there you go.