AMD ads

I find Flash to be intensely annoying. I uninstalled it years ago and I barely miss it. Fortunately, I have a dual-boot system so if I really need Flash I just re-boot into the other OS where it's still enabled. I'm always surprised at how rarely I need to do this.

One really irritating thing about Flash is that if you uninstall it, it just re-installs itself, next time you log onto a Flash enabled web page. You can get around this by placing the following line in your Hosts file:-

0.0.0.0 download.macromedia.com activex.microsoft.com active.macromedia.com

Presto! No more Flash...! I can still see the adverts - but they aren't animated.

The plot thickens. Just had ANOTHER crash!

An update...

Today I've been using my "alternate boot partition". That's the one I mentioned above which I rarely use because it has animations & Flash etc enabled. My PC has persistently crashed and/or reset itself whilst visiting CodeGuru. This particular partition runs Windows 2000, IE6 and Zone Alarm Pro firewall.

After 2 of the resets I ran AVG anti-virus but no viruses or trojans were detected.

I've just reverted back to my main partition (with animations & Flash disabled) and everything's okay, so far.

Clean for 30+ hours. Maybe someone is listening? :)

The IBM ads are annoying that they can't run in the background. Waiting 30 seconds for a page to BEGIN loading is a drag...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Brad Jones

Does high CPU usage continue after a few seconds? Some ads stll use high CPU cycles initially, but after a few seconds drop down to something more reasonable.

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No. Not with this man-dangling-between-gears ad, Brad. I've been waiting for more than 2 minutes now and the man keeps getting tossed, crushed, twisted, poked and so does my CPU. It's shooting all the way to 94%. There seems to be no end to it.

It is ridiculous that these stupid CPU-intensive ads are being shown on a developer website where people are consistently advising against exactly such practises. And it is a shame that the ads represent such esteemed company like IBM which , again is ridiculous, considering that IBM is big time into server side software and again, CPU loads are the ones that are all the more critical.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Brad Jones

Does high CPU usage continue after a few seconds? Some ads stll use high CPU cycles initially, but after a few seconds drop down to something more reasonable.

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I see this behavior: initial CPU usage very high and after a few seconds it drops to 10% or so.

But why should anyone tolerate this, particularly in the name of advertising? The 10% CPU usage is accompanied by near-constant disk access. I have better things for my computer to do, and I dislike the intrusion.

Mike

Getting kind of tired of waiting for the GIL ad to complete. It's like 20 seconds wasted every time that IBM ad shows.

Those IBM ads are particularly irritating and probably not very self-serving. I'd be more inclined to buy somebody else's products just because of IBM's annoying adverts!!

If you own a dual-boot system, take my tip (above) and uninstall Flash from one of the boot OS's. On my PC, the time taken for a CodeGuru page to load is currently around 2-3 seconds without Flash or 15-20 seconds if Flash is installed.

I haven't suffered any crashes for a day or so - even though I'm using the "Flash enabled" boot OS. Has something changed in the last day or two?

I was just going to comment that I haven't had a crash in a day or so, but as soon as I clicked on this thread's link, *POOF*!

I thought traffic was down, so that minimized the time each ad was shown. Not sure if I'm right about the traffic, or the ads, but it seems likely.