I tried to play Historian sees S&P fall to 400 Started by beeMay 17 using IE7. Crashed computer (had to manually shut off), so I finally installed Firefox 4.0.1. (which I had planned to do anyway). Told it to import IE links, etc., but none there when opened.
However, main problem is I tried playing video again - 1st attempt got message "Need to Update Flash" - so I updated Flash to current 10.3.181.14. Tried again using Firefox after reset - STILL crashed computer. So I suspect it is Flash itself that is doing this. Any suggestions?
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I'm afraid Accipiter is right- don't try and watch stuff that your computer doesn't like.
Problem seems to be your flash player. Unfortunately, ever since Adobe added Flash video acceleration via your graphics card there has been issues due to bugs in video drivers.
At home I have a desktop with Nvidia graphics card and I had screen going blank issue on flash pages. After battling with the issue for about a month, I have decided to move the video connector to the video second output connector on the card (card supports two screens although I have only one) and problem resolved. No other program including some highly graphics oriented games suffered from this problem. The problem did exist at all browsers on the computer so it is very unlikely that your problem is the browser although browser is the tool you used to get there.
I am using 10.2.159.1 version of flash player at this time on this laptop with Firefox 4 on Windows 7.
Check your flash version (using flash itself) at http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/155/tn_15507.html
One other thing that you can do at the above version check page, right click on the flash version (the flash app) and choose "Settings...". (On the leftmost tab of the settings window) You will see a checkbox next to "Enable Hardware Acceleration". Clear that box and click "Close". Try the flash page giving trouble again.
If you can, check for updated driver for your video card. After updating your video driver, if it still does not work, you might want to downgrade an earlier version of flash which will be a pain going forward.
BTW, I have embedded a new video on the same thread instead of the Weathtrack one. Try to see if it works.
I think I'll have my tech guy check this out and fix it for me, if possible.
Only problem with trying to not play videos that won't crash is I don't know whether it will or not until I try to access it. So I will see if my tech guy can fix it without too much cost.
I suspected as much re Flash being the problem. I'm very uncomfortable with computer hardware - and especially updating software drivers as one software program I bought that searches and updates drivers for my system completely messed up my entire system - took me a week to just get back to where I was before the updates.
And thanks for your links - I'll try the "check flash version" - but I've emailed the tech guy I've used to have him check out the problems and possible replace video card or update driver - or whatever it takes (within reasonable expense) so I can watch videos without worrying about computer crash since it does appear that you (and many others here) are not having this problem.
Cathy
It would be so great if any video I accessed played now without crashing! Guess I won't know until I try more videos, but this success gives me hope.
THANKS AGAIN!
P.S. Learned something else new and have one quick follow-up question, if you don't mind. Adobe says that IE uses DIFFERENT Flash Player than Firefox or Google Chrome. I installed the update while in IE, but I'm also alternating using Firefox to access my Morningstar portfolios as refresh quite a bit quicker than IE there. Do you happen to know if I access Adobe site using Firefox and install Flash if that could cause problems?
If there is a continuing problem you should not delay the resolution. You might get an freeze at an unexpected moment when you are quickly trying to access some bit of information on a random page. Dealing with freeze under such situation is worse than doing controlled experiments and with expectation of potential freeze.
There are different builds of Flash plug-ins for each browser though they use the same core code base. I am not sure what happens if you only update one browser. If the two plug-ins are sharing some library file, there could have been a mismatch which can cause problems.
I strongly suggest you directly visit Adobe to download Flash Uninstaller here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html
Download this to your Windows desktop and close all browsers and run it to uninstall Flash completely from your system.
Next go to Adobe again at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and download the Flash Installer from Adobe onto your Windows Desktop, and again, close all browser windows and run it to update. This should detect all your installed browser (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera are most popular) and install the correct plug-ins for each browser.
Note Uninstall/Re-install might reset your choice of "Enable Hardware Acceleration" setting to default as well.
At this point, you should try again with problem video and see if your problem persists. You might try both Hardware Acceleration on and off. If it does not make any difference, leave it on (enabled)
Regarding the video drivers, I agree 3rd party tool scanning your system and suggesting updates might occasionally botch-up. If you are using a branded computer (Dell, HP etc.) you should visit the support section, enter your computer model (or support tag), OS and if there is an update they will provide a download link to video driver. Updating the driver is often easy as running the program and following a few prompts these days.
Sometimes however, the manufacturer stops providing updates to the driver for older models but you can often obtain a newer version from the Video Card driver supplier (Nvidia, ATI/AMD, Intel are most common these days). But, try your computer manufacturer site first for an updated driver for your model and OS.
I can see your reluctance to upgrade Video drivers. So, leave the video driver to last to try. First make sure your Adobe installation is correct.
But....just in case... if I have any more problems, I've printed out your added suggestions and will definitely follow them if I need to do more.
Anyway, you should have all your flash plug-ins in synced. A full uninstall and re-install can clean up issues dealing with mismatched files, garbled configurations etc. This is easy and safe to do. Should take 5 mins.
Ideally, I would prefer having Hardware Acceleration on for video, which makes it smoother to play (especially full screen video) on platforms to work. But after uninstall/reinstall it is still not possible to play without disabling hardware acceleration for Flash and you are not willing to upgrade the video driver (which may or may not solve the problem) than disabling acceleration is the only way to go.
Given a vulnerability is found every day, and since Flash is a popular plugin, hackers is targeting to Flash often.
For those of you having similar problems as I did with Windows crashing when I accessed many videos (when I had "enable hardware" checked) and frequently when updated Flash Player..... I found and fixed the problem. It seemed to be in my Dell-installed video card. Bought new Nvidia video card and had installed - I re-enabled hardware, updated flash - and now no problems (knock on wood).
FYI: I also purchased 27" monitor so I could read all my Morningstar portfolio information on 1 screen (then used old monitor as second screen showing my Excel file I update). Default resolution and settings on new monitor AWFUL - I could hardly read at default resolution. When I lowered resolution, font display even worse. I spent 5 hours trying different Windows font/display settings, changing fonts in OE, IE, Firefox, googled best screen font to use, etc., etc. Nothing helped UNTIL FOUND 2 BEST FIXES. So for those of you also having this problem with higher resolution monitors, fixes I found were:
1) Change DPI in Display to 120;
2) Changed DISPLAY-APPEARANCE-EFFECTS from "Standard" to "CLEAR TYPE" - HUGE DIFFERENCE REALLY HELPED.
With LCD/LED monitors it is important to run the display at the display's native resolution. The other resolutions are only going to make it worse. Old CRT monitors were multi-resolution. Newer LCD/LED are only single native resolution and emulation of other resolutions will blur things.
Moving to a large screen LCD/LED has a disadvantage that as you found at native resolution the characters are too small for eyes. Clear Type should have been default selection for you. I am not sure why you had a different choice. Maybe you selected an older Classic Theme and it changed the fonts. Secondly while 120DPI cause the characters to be rendered larger, some programs have problem with the new font metric (software developers unfortunately do not regularly test at this resolution for fonts). So, you can sometimes see misplaced GUI elements or things that are cut-off because it did not fit in the allocated space etc.
Are you a computer programmer also? You seem to have vast knowledge in this arena also making you multi-talented expert, especially in what I consider two of the most important areas - investing and computers.
I DID find one problem with above setting - in Morningstar when their rolling daily ticker things only showed half of the figures. So I had to change the option of "let program set it's own fonts" back to "yes" so I could see all. Still haven't found the best viewable font that doesn't take up too much space to use for toolbar and general text areas...but what I've chosen now works ok.