Help, please! Weird network(?) problem
Help, please! Weird network(?) problem
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defblade

Original Poster:

7,887 posts

231 months

Yesterday (23:33)
quotequote all
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

982 posts

225 months


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

5,282 posts

201 months

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

M

Quantum State

8,658 posts

298 months

Have you tried a different browser ?

jimmyjimjim

7,850 posts

256 months

Maybe user profile based?

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

defblade

Original Poster:

7,887 posts

231 months

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 smile !" ... 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 rofl )

camel_landy

5,282 posts

201 months

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

1,079 posts

130 months

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.