Firefox 3.0.11 freezes

Today my Firefox 3 upgraded, and after restarting, it reloaded my sessions, but repeatedly froze after about 20 to 40 seconds. This seems to be a widely experienced problem.

You can downgrade to 3.0.10 by installing from here.

Firefox 3 CPU Usage

After upgrading from Firefox 2 to Firefox 3, I noticed some strange behavior in terms of memory usage and, mainly, CPU usage.

My browsing habits cause open windows and tabs within windows to multiply in no time, so I expected some improvement by upgrading. Though memory consumption was slightly better, and hovering over the History menu item no longer freezes up the browser for several minutes, CPU hogging was worse than before the upgrade.

I found that two tips helped me reduce both CPU and memory consumption:

• in the URL field, type about:config
• locate the Urlclassifier.updatecachemax setting and set it to 104857600.
• locate the browser.cache.memory.enable setting and click to set it to false.

My Firefox ran smoother after restarting the browser.

Unsearchable MS error messages

A friend asked me to have a look at a USB harddisk which cannot be accessed anymore.

I plug it into my PC, try chkdsk g:, and get the message:

Der Typ des Dateisystems ist NTFS.
Version und Status des Datenträgers konnten nicht festgestellt werden. CHKDSK wurde abgebrochen.

Try to google the phrase, or use MSDN if you prefer, and receive… NOTHING.

Now wouldn’t you expect all the funny messages that Windows (or *any* operating system, for that matter) generates, to be searchable on the web? Plus statements by the respective manufacturer about their meaning and possible solutions?

I mean, the time is, uhm, 2008!