processor93
Registered
G4 laptop, 1.5 GHz/512 MB, OS 10.3.9
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Since last week I've been experiecing sudden internet outages or extreme slowdown/hangups. For anywhere from 1 to 15 minutes, none of my net programs will find their hosts. Sometimes it begins with a page not loading 100% (as I type this the address bar is still mostly blue and the status bar reads "completed 81 of 82 items"). Then pages may load up only about 10%. Sometimes reloading will solve this (or just get it to load a bit further), often not. Sometimes in the status bar I see "loading from [hostname]...", sometimes "resolving host [hostname]..." (the latter message seems to be more serious). I have also rebooted and run Disk Utility with little or no difference.
Of course my first suspect was the DSL connection so I called Verizon, who tested my modem and line remotely and told me everything was fine, twice.
My next suspect was my Ethernet cable, which has a semi-broken clip on one end, meaning it does not "snap" in perfectly. It's been like this for a few weeks/months though, and this issue only started Friday. Still, I thought it was worth testing, so I pulled it out and connected via a nearby Wireless network (not mine). At first this seemed to solve the issue. However now the same thing will happen on this other network. Which theoretically eliminates the problem from being located either in my modem/line or in my ethernet cable.
I was also able to connect to the modem's gateway through Safari (1.3 v312) one time but NOT another time - which made me wonder if the issue is somehow internal. There have also been instances of Safari connecting but not Netscape or vice versa.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I know there have been a few OSX viruses, so I wonder if this could be some kind of worm that periodically eats away at intgernet prefs files or is using my connection to do something else. This sounds ridiculous to me since I've never had virus issues since switching to OSX 2 years ago but I just wonder.
Or could there be a few simple prefs files I need to trash or reinstall to "refresh" my internet software?
On a (possibly) unrelated note, I have also lately been having weird things happen to my display. several times I've seen the menubar disappear entirely, only to have the elements reappear but without the bar, slowly, sometimes only if I pass my mouse over them. Last night many characters in every program and display disappeared from the screen, leaving holes. e.g. the phrase above would have looked like this:
"m ny ch r cters in eve y pr gram nd d splay dis ppea ed"
This was only visible to me, as I was in Yahoo IM at the time and the other person saw all the letters I typed. Rebooting cleared the issue.
Any suggestions would be massively helpful as I'm very frustrated with this.
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Since last week I've been experiecing sudden internet outages or extreme slowdown/hangups. For anywhere from 1 to 15 minutes, none of my net programs will find their hosts. Sometimes it begins with a page not loading 100% (as I type this the address bar is still mostly blue and the status bar reads "completed 81 of 82 items"). Then pages may load up only about 10%. Sometimes reloading will solve this (or just get it to load a bit further), often not. Sometimes in the status bar I see "loading from [hostname]...", sometimes "resolving host [hostname]..." (the latter message seems to be more serious). I have also rebooted and run Disk Utility with little or no difference.
Of course my first suspect was the DSL connection so I called Verizon, who tested my modem and line remotely and told me everything was fine, twice.
My next suspect was my Ethernet cable, which has a semi-broken clip on one end, meaning it does not "snap" in perfectly. It's been like this for a few weeks/months though, and this issue only started Friday. Still, I thought it was worth testing, so I pulled it out and connected via a nearby Wireless network (not mine). At first this seemed to solve the issue. However now the same thing will happen on this other network. Which theoretically eliminates the problem from being located either in my modem/line or in my ethernet cable.
I was also able to connect to the modem's gateway through Safari (1.3 v312) one time but NOT another time - which made me wonder if the issue is somehow internal. There have also been instances of Safari connecting but not Netscape or vice versa.
Has anyone else experienced anything like this? I know there have been a few OSX viruses, so I wonder if this could be some kind of worm that periodically eats away at intgernet prefs files or is using my connection to do something else. This sounds ridiculous to me since I've never had virus issues since switching to OSX 2 years ago but I just wonder.
Or could there be a few simple prefs files I need to trash or reinstall to "refresh" my internet software?
On a (possibly) unrelated note, I have also lately been having weird things happen to my display. several times I've seen the menubar disappear entirely, only to have the elements reappear but without the bar, slowly, sometimes only if I pass my mouse over them. Last night many characters in every program and display disappeared from the screen, leaving holes. e.g. the phrase above would have looked like this:
"m ny ch r cters in eve y pr gram nd d splay dis ppea ed"
This was only visible to me, as I was in Yahoo IM at the time and the other person saw all the letters I typed. Rebooting cleared the issue.
Any suggestions would be massively helpful as I'm very frustrated with this.
