Ok, so it is 16 months old now and will soon be reaching geriatricity in computer age terms i.e. one human day = 350,000 years in computer development terms.
Fact is, it as gazillions of gigabytes of memory, a hard drive that would not fill up if I downloaded and stored every film ever made and a processor that would make NASA jealous.
Ok, so a couple of mild exaggerations in that previous paragraph, but you get my drift? I have had 10 demo Empty4 platforms running on it without a hitch in previous months.
A few weeks ago it started to slow down. At times it would slow to a speed that would have a snail giggling as it overtook my processor.
It got to the stage last week when the only platforms I was running was my live trading account and the Peaky demo. I even closed down HGBnDnSSnFB - and I am close to going live with that one. Peaky is an even more likely candidate, so I kept that one running.
Viewing the Crapforms could be a nightmare. They would not show when I selected them in the Taskbar. They would not minimise when I tried to minimise them. Selecting a pair tab to show what what was going on with the individual pair could be a joke. Click the line; go for a coffee; do some shopping; prepare a meal; return to the Crapform in the hope that what I wanted might be showing. Often a forlorn hope.
It was only stuff relying on a connection to the internet that was slow. Everything else was fine.
No prizes for guessing whom I was blaming for all this.
Then I wondered if my machine had been hacked and was being used as a drone so I googled, "How to tell if my computer is being operated remotely" or some-such. I followed all the steps offered as a result of my search. No difference.
I had long ago taken to restarting the machine a few times a day. This made enough difference for a short period of time to allow me to do the manual trading I wanted to do. Or reply to a post at SHF. It was never long before the machine slowed to the speed of an asthmatic ant carrying a bag of heavy shopping (Blackadder fans will recognise the reference).
My browser is Firefox. I use Firefox because it is not Internet Explorer. I love Microsoft products as much as I love CrapperTrader4. You would have to hold a gun to the head of one of my piano pupils before I would use IE.
I started to notice that an IE window would open when I restarted the machine, with an error message that something-or-other could not find aaResources.Dll/104 or something very similar. Thick though I am, I did eventually start to wonder what this was all about.
So I googled it. It turned out to be something needed by Amazon Assistant.
I ended up at this site: https://www.reddit.com/r/software/comme ... cesdll104/
Here I learned that Amazon Assistant can slow machines to a crawl, and what to do about it. I have removed AA and my machine has returned to its former speed glory.
I often use Amazon. I have no idea what Amazon Assistant is or how it came to be on my machine. I can say that it fucked up my life for several weeks and it is a bloody menace.
So, if your machine is crawling along like a disease on life support, then have a look for AA.
Any of you guys have similar experiences with other software that your all-singing-all-dancing anti-virus-malware-anything-else-nasty has not already deleted, please post them here for the benefit of other members.
And if anybody can tell me why Firefox is so damn slow these days, I would really appreciate it.
