ItsGeekToMe.co

Q: Facebook freezes up to a minute as soon as I attempt a scroll. No other program freezes. I have contacted both Windows and Facebook but no replies.

– Joe M.
Crestview, Florida

A: This is going to be one of those problems that I just can’t solve outright for you, because I simply can’t get enough information from your question to come up with any specific cause.  However, I can offer some guidance that may be of help.

This may sound odd, but I would start by assuming you have some sort of malware presence on your system.  The symptoms you describe seem to me to just reek of something that’s trying to steal personal information from Facebook.  So the usual advice about trying top-quality virus, malware, and spyware scanners applies.  Also, go through your web browser’s list of add-ons and browser helper objects (BHOs) and disable any that you don’t recognize.  Worst case, if you’re using IE, hit that master browser reset switch that I’ve talked about in the past.  Be warned that this will reset everything, including stored passwords, sites added to your Trusted Sites list, etc.  Finally, check to make sure your installations of Flash/Shockwave are up-to-date.

One thing you might try in an attempt to gather more data, or at least un-freeze the browser is to bring up the Windows Task Manager with the key combination [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[Esc].  Go to the Processes tab and sort by Memory.  You’ll probably see several instances of process iexplore.exe (that’s IE, and all the support stuff mentioned above that runs under it).  If you find instances that are using multiple hundreds of K of memory, end them and let them restart.  That isn’t exactly a fix, but it’s a work-around I have to use every now and then when my own browser freezes up.

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Q: I don’t like folks poking around in my computer and several times in the past couple of months while I’m riding my healthy computer steed through the internet or often while I’m just minding my own business moving pictures around or writing something in WORD, my trusty virus-troll guard opens a window to alert me to a nasty intrusion~!! It tells me an “unknown computer” has logged onto my computer~!! Holy Cow, is someone trying to infect me? It further said today that the nefarious intruder hails from 192.168.1.122 (other days were other IP addresses) and when I go to WHOIS or one of the other engines to look up that nasty guy, I draw a blank~!! If my virus troll is concerned, then so am I. I don’t want unknown intruders slopping around in my computer but there seems to be no easy way to stop it as the troll does not ask me if it’s alright. I could download PEERBLOCK I guess but is there an easier way to keep out creepy-crawlers like my intruder?

– Wayne T.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A:  You sure have a way with words, Wayne!  Now listen to some of mine, because I bet they’re going to cheese you off.  There is an old horror movie cliché where the young female victim is alone in a house, and the phone rings, and a bad guy says “I’m watching you!”.  She calls the police, and they tell her to stay put while they trace the call, and she spends the next hour of the movie getting the wits scared out of her.  Then the police call back and say “Get out of there!  The calls are coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE!”  Remember that?  That’s you, Wayne.  Well, not you, but your computer.  You see, in a shared Internet environment, such as one finds in a typical residential LAN, the router is really the only thing connected to your modem, and hence to the Internet.  Everything else (including your computer, and the “nefarious intruder”) are assigned their IP Address by the router.  By convention, these addresses always follow the pattern 192.168.1.xxx.  So, the “intruder” is actually a device attached to your own network (my guess would be an all-in-one printer that is refreshing the list of PCs to which it can send scanned documents).  That’s why WHOIS doesn’t know who it is.  There are literally millions of other devices in the world assigned to that same IP address, and each one of them is also behind a router in someone’s home or business.

You can find out what device is 192.168.1.122 on your network by logging into your router and looking at the IP Address Table or DHCP Lease Table that all routers maintain.  The exact mechanics of how this is done depends on your make and model of router.  There are also a few programs out there that will build network “maps” for you that might be of help.  I’ve never had cause to need these, but if you go this route, look for names like IP Scanner, and Network Magic.