Help, please! Weird network(?) problem

[defblade]

Hi folks,

I work in a community pharmacy. We have 6 computers running on a wired network (and wi-fi available).

5 of them are fine.

The laptop at the front desk has a really weird problem...
when you're using a browser, changing a page or opening a new tab just gives a white screen... until you switch to another tab, or another window (any window, like calc, not just another browser) at which point the whole page you were going to loads instantly. Oh, and not all the time, maybe 75% of it. Some days, no problem at all; others every single time. Chrome and Edge both do the same thing.

As our whole pharmacy system is now browser based, this is causing a fair bit of irritation.



I cannot find anything wrong... it's the same despite:
Clearing every stored/cached thing I can find in our browsers
Removing some spurious extensions
Changing router/switch sockets for the ethernet cable
Changing the cable
Changing sockets for that cable
Unplugging and using wi-fi instead
and finally... the laptop was due for replacement soon anyway, so the company got us a new one ahead of schedule as it appeared the problem was in the original laptop as no external changes made any difference... guess what... the new one seemed ok for 2 days, and now it's doing exactly the same!!!
The new laptop didn't have an ethernet port, so I've bought a ethernet-to-usb adaptor... which works fine and has made things neither better or worse.


I'm certain it must be something to do with the network, but I'm utterly stumped.
I'm down to wondering if the network name of the laptop could be causing trouble - the others are all WS-1, WS-2 etc; the laptops have longer names with "laptop" in, but even they are slightly different to each other (the new one has been called "laptop(n)").

Help!

[babelfish]

defblade said:

I'm certain it must be something to do with the network,

why?

defblade said:

when you're using a browser, changing a page or opening a new tab just gives a white screen... until you switch to another tab, or another window (any window, like calc, not just another browser) at which point the whole page you were going to loads instantly. Oh, and not all the time, maybe 75% of it.

it sound software based to me

[camel_landy]

Have you tried updating the device drivers? In particular, the display drivers.

M

[Quantum State]

Have you tried a different browser ?

[jimmyjimjim]

Maybe user profile based?

Create a new user, log in as that user instead?

[defblade]

babelfish said:

defblade said:

I'm certain it must be something to do with the network,

why?
Because a new computer didn't fix the problem! Suggests it's external to the PC to me. I'm happy to wrong though!

defblade said:

when you're using a browser, changing a page or opening a new tab just gives a white screen... until you switch to another tab, or another window (any window, like calc, not just another browser) at which point the whole page you were going to loads instantly. Oh, and not all the time, maybe 75% of it.

it sound software based to me

Well, I thought it was software based until a brand new out of the box fresh installs of everything computer started doing the same...

camel_landy said:

Have you tried updating the device drivers? In particular, the display drivers.

M

"The best drivers are installed" according to Device Manager; Windows is up to date.

jimmyjimjim said:

Maybe user profile based?

Create a new user, log in as that user instead?

Hmmmm, the laptop is logged into a gmail account; other computers are variously logged into old outlook accounts or just "person1". I've tried signing out on the laptop and going to "person 1". I don't know where/how the old computer might have been logged in, but it was doing the same thing on 2 different browsers so i suspect it's unlikely it would have been logged in on both to the gmail account - even less likely as it old laptop was... well, old, and far more likely to be on the old outlook account like this one I'm using now.
The intermittent nature of the problem makes testing very difficult, too, of course - "now it's working !" ... then an hour later "it's playing up again".

Quantum State said:

Have you tried a different browser ?

Tried on Edge and Chrome, although there's a little voice at the back of my head that says they may be based on similar tech??
Any recommendations for which of the others to try? (I'm not really supposed to install stuff, but so long as it's "proper" name software, they won't care if I fix it )

[camel_landy]

defblade said:

camel_landy said:

Have you tried updating the device drivers? In particular, the display drivers.

M

"The best drivers are installed" according to Device Manager; Windows is up to date.

For something as quirky as this, it might be worth checking up on the vendor website, rather than rely on Windows.

As for browsers, it might be worth having a go with Firefox as Edge & Chrome use the 'Chromium engine' for rendering. Firefox uses its own - Gecko.

M

[Pachydermus]

defblade said:

Hmmmm, the laptop is logged into a gmail account; other computers are variously logged into old outlook accounts or just "person1". I've tried signing out on the laptop and going to "person 1". I don't know where/how the old computer might have been logged in, but it was doing the same thing on 2 different browsers so i suspect it's unlikely it would have been logged in on both to the gmail account - even less likely as it old laptop was... well, old, and far more likely to be on the old outlook account like this one I'm using now.

he meant login to the computer with a new windows account as there may be something in the windows user profile causing this presuming you're using the same user profile on the new laptop as the old.

[xeny]

Any chance a user has found a quirky behaviour that has then impacted the new laptop?

[speedyman]

Have you looked into the event logs ????

[Mr Whippy]

If only the laptop is having this issue it could be some weird laptop/graphics driver feature.

Is it built in Intel display driver?

There are all sorts of stupid energy saving features in there that can just half-work or break things, that may have been turned on or changed ever so slightly and is now not updating the video buffer to 'save energy' until some event occurs, like a tab swap or app focus swap or something.

[xeny]

Chrome and Edge both offer the ability to disable GPU hardware acceleration. That woudl significantly reduce the possibility of graphic driver related issues.

[51mes]

Usual step in this sort of diagnosis is to clear all browser settings and delete all.cached data...

Got me out of odd web issues many a time...

[shtu]

I'd be tempted to temporarily swap one of the "fine" machines into the iffy location.

Are you -certain- that the enduser isn't doing something that they haven't thought to mention? This has the whiff of "oh, I always install that utility on any machine i use, didn't I mention it?" You may have to watch over them to spot what is causing the odd behaviour.

[Mr E]

Does it behave the same if you use a browser in private mode?

If you’re technically inclined, grab a wireshark log of the page load; if you can’t correlate the packet transfer with the page display it’s not a network problem it’s a laptop sw problem.

[defblade]

Thanks folks, there's lots to try here... 2 things are going to slow me down tho - first off, it is intermittent (so, for example, I signed out of the gmail account it was signed in with and ran it as "person1" today, and it was behaving itself properly... but I can't believe it's fixed until 2 or 3 days of good behaviour have passed); secondly, I'm the pharmacist in a busy pharmacy, so I'm having to fit this in around approx 100 other jobs

I will become increasingly technically minded if necessary - good community pharmacists have to be very fast learners, we never know what's coming in through the door next

[eeLee]

I suspect the SSD is failing or needs wiping. Is a full wipe and restage from USB media an option?

The reason I suspect this is that the white screen as akin to a "pregnant pause" where the machine waits for something to load from disk.

[mmm-five]

eeLee said:

I suspect the SSD is failing or needs wiping. Is a full wipe and restage from USB media an option?

The reason I suspect this is that the white screen as akin to a "pregnant pause" where the machine waits for something to load from disk.

But the issue persisted on a brand new replacement laptop!

[camel_landy]

Random one...

Can you compare the DNS settings on the problem machine vs one of the working ones?

Just a thought but if this 'pause' is only cleared by switching tabs, rather than simply waiting, then it probably isn't DNS related. However, if the window jumps into life in 5-10 sec, then it could be a problem with the primary DNS server and it's waiting to time-out, before using the 2nd one.

M

[White-Noise]

Obvious suggestion but make sure you have a decent antivirus suite.

I may have missed it but does the problem occur on wired and wireless?