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Solved: Important Website runs extremely slow IE7

691 views 1 reply 1 participant last post by  audrei 
#1 ·
Hi everyone,

The most recent problem I am having is that I can't use the one web site that is essential to my work. I am a Realtor and I have to use the MLS system on armls.marketlinx.com. The site runs so slow that it is completely useless, taking like 15 minutes to load and then 10 minutes to switch pages. Everything else works fine and loads at a normal pace, but the ARMLS web site takes 10 or 15 minutes to open a screen after the initial logon which proceeds as normal.

Most other web sites run at a normal speed on this computer. I have put it in the trusted sites zone for my firewall and Internet Explorer and enabled cookies for it, and I have dumped the temporary internet files but it still runs ridiculously slow. If I bring it up on my husbands computer it runs fine, but this is too inconvenient to have to work at his desk when all my stuff is on my desk. His computer is on the same home network in the same room as mine.

As for my computer, it is 2 1/2 years old.

I guess I will have to fill you in with the "long version" ... but don't say I didn't warn you.

It is a Gateway 3 GHz with 1 GB RAM, running XP Media Center. I also have an HP 3GHz with 2GB RAM with XP Media Center that I try to keep running for my husband, and a whole room full of ancient obsolete machines dating all the way back to windows 95. The HP is only 6 months old refurb.

The two are networked together with a Netgear wireless router using the wired ports and Cox broadband access.

They are firewalled behind the router and additionally, using Zone Alarm Pro. I am running the full suite of Zone Alarm security products including firewall virus protection and spyware removal tool on both. In addition I am running Webroot spyware removal tool on both and AOL spyware removal tool (which is due to expire soon.) All utilities run daily on both machines separately. Automatic updates for Windows is enabled on the HP because my husband can't be bothered with updates. On the Gateway I have the alerts enabled with the option to download and install windows updates at my discretion.

About two months ago, despite all the security software I have in place, two Trojans were discovered in the Gateway machine. Stupid me, instead of leaving them in quarantine, I deleted them, taking out a piece of my boot sector where they must have embedded themselves. It was telling me that the NTLDR file was missing among other things.

I had been guilty of not doing regular backups and had an enormous amount of data on my hard drive. I had already purchased a large external storage unit including auto backup software with good intentions and then put it in the closet unopened for several months to be dealt with at a later date.

At the first hint of trouble before deleting the Trojans I quickly dumped my documents and photos into my husbands computer, and just in time because I could not even boot into safe mode after I lost boot capability, and the machine was stuck in a continuous restart cycle.

I disabled the restart on boot failure option in setup and tried the System Restore option to try and repair the windows files, but it would not allow me to choose the non destructive restore option. It kept warning me that all my files would be deleted and gave me no other option than to say OK. Then at that point I would have to shut down the machine to get out of that screen and avoid starting the restore. I have an XP pro upgrade version disk that I purchased a few years back, but I can never get the files to all copy correctly for a clean windows install and I didn't know if it would repair a windows installation that had a restore partition loaded on the same hard drive.

So, continuing on the path of stupidity, I attempted to "fix" the boot sector, using some downloaded "fix files" further damaging whatever was already going on. I got an "Unmountable Boot" error. When all attempts to fix the operating system files were exhausted, ( about 15 to 20 hours of doing nothing else) I went to the store and purchased an external enclosure for an internal hard drive with USB interface because I did not want to open up both computers at the same time and be without a reference.

Then I took the hard drive out of the Gateway and plugged it into the HP to see what was left on it. All the data was gobbledygook except for the restore partition. I knew I was out of options and I just put it back into the Gateway and did a hard system restore. Then after many hours of reloading hardware drivers and software applications and copying my files back to the clean hard drive I was back on track.

I was a good girl and dug the external hard drive out of the closet at that point and hooked it up. I ran into some problems trying to get both machines to backup to the same external storage, so I ended up doing another "no no." I had to set the HP up to backup to a folder on the Gateway hard drive and then subsequently would get backed up when the Gateway backed up. I rationalized that this was temporary until I could find the problem with accessing the External storage from the HP. Something about permissions from the administrator ( which of course is me) and I thought I had enabled permissions and sharing on everything I could find in both computers that seemed relevant.

So after that nightmare 48 hours of work, I thought everything was okay except the HP still seemed to have fits of running slowly and freezing screens, which had already been going on for some time. Everything was as back to normal as could be expected for about a month.

Then about a week ago I started having slowdowns and downloads that aborted before finishing and webpage timeouts etc. on the Gateway again. Historically it has been a machine that doesn't like updates. Whenever an application has to be updated whether it be windows or just an Adobe update or whatever, it requires at least 3 reboots to recover from the update and restore internet connectivity and so forth. Lately it has been worse than ever, requiring 5 or 6 reboots to get clear of whatever was recently changed. Now I get a message right after reboot that the "windows application cannot start from a debugger." If I just say ok it continues to load windows normally.

The latest thing is an "allergy" to the armls.marketlinx website. Everything else works fine and loads at a normal pace, but the ARMLS takes 10 or 15 minutes to open a screen after the initial logon which proceeds as normal. The same website opens normally at a normal pace on the HP.

The latest thing I tried was installing Firefox on this machine and trying to see if the armls.marketlinx website would run on it. But no luck, still the same nonsense.

I am getting frustrated because I am running out of options and feel that I am in over my head.
Now if you actually made it through reading all of this, let me congratulate you and say thanks again for taking the time to try to help me.


Thanks,
Audrei
 
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