Thinkpad freezing over games

[swee'pea99]

Got my youngest a Thinkpad 570e off ebay - I always loved them, and I thought it would be perfect for her, being small and light and she only needs it for basic browsing and the odd email. But she plays on something called Yoville, which is part of Facebook, and apparently it keeps just suddenly freezing. Not crashing or rebooting or anything - just literally freezing; won't respond to the mouse or keyboard in any way, won't do nothing. Is this just inherent in the limitations of the beastie, or is there anything I can do to prevent it? (It's not *that* feeble - it's a Pentium III, 450 Mhz, with a maximum allowable 320Mb RAM.)

 

[hackbike 666]

It is IMHO a weak machine.

My new laptop has a 1.6 ghz processor and 2 gig ram and I still find it a bit slow.

So it has almost 4x the power of your daughters machine and 6x the ram.

This is only my personal opinion though.

I can't test it as im not on facebook but it does sound like the machine.

Lets see what other people think though.

 

[2Loose]

It is all browser based so it should be powerful enough to run this fine...any animations may be slow, but this shouldn't detract from the game (my girlfriend plays it too, it is hardly taxing )

I would try reinstalling Flash for a start, even better use a different browser - FireFox, Chrome, Opera etc. just to see if the same thing occurs.

I doubt it will, so good luck.

 

[hackbike 666]

Depends what else it's running.

 

[swee'pea99]

Thanks - sorry, there hadn't been responses so I forgot to check back. Ok, it wasn't (at the time) running anything else, it is running Firefox, and unfortunately it doesn't just run slowly, it does completely freeze the machine. Maybe I'll try reinstalling flash - might help.

Oh, and sure - it's a weak machine. No question. I just wondered if there was any fundamental reason why it would be too weak for this.

Thanks again.

 

[2Loose]

What version of Windows are you running, if you are indeed running Windows?
Oh, and if Firefox is your browser, then I will restate - reinstall Flash! andor try the same thing in Internet Explorer and see if it crashes in a similiar way, or works fine.

I do not believe your machine to be too weak for looking at and playing with web sites. It may take longer to boot up and load windows andor your browser than a newer machine, but once you are at your website, it should be only marginally slower than a rip-roaring, bought yesterday PC. Other programs may be running that are not visible to you which may be sucking some power away from you though, such as antivirus progs or instant messengers or whatever is sitting in your task bar by the clock. Undesirable programs like adware or virus(es? never too sure of the plural, virii?) can use all of your pc, not even letting you do anything you want, or certainly far more slowly than you think it should be able too.

The more recent the Operating System, the more it 'tries to do for you' so has more 'helper' programs running, so more ram and more cpu horsepower is required until you turn things that you do not use off.

Running some versions of Linux on your machine would positively fly at exactly the same task...they would be less 'pretty' than modern versions of Windows or MacOS, but would respond to your instructions far more quickly. Saying that, they would offer most users less familiarity and would therefore require more 'learning'.

Before I get into Windows bashing, Go 'Reinstall Flash' and also try the site in Internet Explorer to see if there is a common them to your freezes.

 

[swee'pea99]

Thanks a lot 2loose. I will do as you suggest. I would try linux, but this is for my 10 year old daughter, so I need all the familiarity/user-friendliness I can get. Oh, and it's running Windows ME, by the way - everyone's favourite version of Windows! It can't run XP - not enough RAM. I'll see how the flash reinstall works (I've already uninstalled the anti-virus software to hopefully free up some resources).

 

[2Loose]

Ooh Sweapee, just to take a look, go and get a CD version of Ubuntu, burn it to CD and then you can boot from it, and give it a try without having to overwrite Windows or change anything. Then when you have had a look, take it out and restart the PC, back into Windows as you left it. I think you will find that it isn't quite as 'different' as you expect and is a very easy way to take a look.

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download