Crappity. Our Firefox 2 has been crapping out, stalling out, crashing and miserying all over us for weeks now (Mac, OSX 10.4.11). After wrestling with multiple failed attempts to upgrade to 3, I just uninstalled it completely and attempted to reinstall 2, and now it won't even do that. The download begins nicely, proceeds through the "This download contains an application. Do you want to continue?" clicky-window, and then stops in the middle of the user agreement. Multiple attempts, a software update, and a restart aren't helping. It won't take 3, won't take 2, can't complete a download at all no how no way.

At first I wanted the new shiny Firefox, but now I just want our old shitty Firefox back! Help, please!

Which version of Firefox 2 are you re-installing? Perhaps an older version will do better. You can get them from oldapps.com: [link]

It won't even finish the download. I tried all the way down to 1.5, and the download stalled out at the same point, at the very beginning of "Displaying the software license agreement."

This probably isn't it, but do you have enough hard drive space?

We've got tons, 59 out of 77GB available.

What browser are you using to get the download? Safari? Camino?

My three-year-old Dell Inspiron laptop is beginning to give me the dreaded Blue Screen of Death occasionally over the last month or two. Usually I can restart it and it runs okay after that, but it's been increasingly slow although I rarely have more running than Firefox, Semagic, and Open Office. A couple of months ago I bought a registry optimizer and that seemed to help a bit, but the last week or so it's been crashing again.

Oh, and this machine runs on XP. I'm ascared of Vista.

Suggestions? I'm backing up my most valued data in case the whole thing just dies, but oy. Not sure what to do here. What is the expected lifetime of a laptop, anyway?

Safari. I can complete a download with Explorer, but then it just sits there and when I try to actually run it, nothing happens. It seems to have completely forgotten how to deal with a .dmg.

FWIW, a couple years ago I know the useful lifetime of laptops was 18 months, at least that's what we were told when my office was leasing them (which is suspect, since the people telling us this stood to make more money if we believed them). My rule of thumb was to double that.

Under no circumstances change over to Vista -- it runs like a dog on smaller older laptops.

One thing you could do, is back up all your data and then reinstall XP and all the other programs onto a cleaned out hard disk. Sometimes that gets rid of the problem, unless it turns out to be more like a failing hard drive, et cetera.

JZ -- I hadn't realized you were on a Mac. In your situation, I'd consider visiting my nearest Genius Bar.