Hivemind question: I'm having all sorts of problems with certain sites/servers when I'm using XP. Facebook is the biggest pain in the arse but there are other sites that won't load/reload quickly. However, in their case it's not so much the site, as it trying to connect to external sites, most of which are ad sites trying to serve up advertisments. It doesn't matter what browser I use--Opera, Firefox, or IE8--and ahemming isn't affected (nor is it a cause cos it happens with or without the program running).

It should also be noted that I don't have this problem when running Ubuntu 9.04. Which is what makes it doubly frustrating.

Anyone got any ideas or suggestions on where to look etc.?

That sounds kinda malware-ish.

that reminds me. i've been having issues with Yahoo and now youtube in Firefox on my laptop. seems to work fine on every other computer i use that also has Firefox. i'm having to use the IE tab add-on that i dled in order to be able to check my mail at Yahoo and get youtube to load at all. youtube says something about Apache. thoughts?

I'd be surprised if it is Gud. I'm running Process Explorer and TCPView by Sysinternals and neither are showing anything untoward. Moreover, I did a complete XP reinstall to try and fix the problem (to no avail, obviously), and I haven't reinstalled many programs since doing it, so I can't imagine where the malware has come from, or where it's hiding.

eta: Oh and Yahoo Mail is another really bad site. It can take many minutes to get to the login page, more minutes to get to the mail page, and many more minutes to logout. Yet it takes seconds to do the same thing on Ubuntu.

Some malware/viruses now hide in the boot sector of your hard drive, so reinstalling XP won't necessarily get rid of these.

If reinstalling XP didn't do the trick, then I really don't know where to look. If Ubuntu doesn't have a problem, then that seems to rule out hardware. I don't know what to think, sorry.

My 8 port ethernet switch died last night. Stopped powering up at all. I decided to go ahead and spend a little money to get a D-Link 16 port hub. It's big and metal and comes with brackets for rack mounting. Maybe not the best deal around, but it feels like a real piece of equipment unlike my old tiny plastic 8 port switch that would sometimes start dropping connections.

Which program is the best to find bootsector baddies? I've just downloaded MalwareBytes' Anti-Malware, HijackThis, and Spybot, plus I have AVG Free 8.5. Do they cover all the bases?

jimi,

can you install adblock plus (a firefox extension) on firefox and open the sites on firefox and see if that improves anything?

this is the page i'm getting when i put in youtube.com.

Bad Request

Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Size of a request header field exceeds server limit. Apache Server at www.youtube.com Port 80