To: scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject: Big...Huge problem

Date: Tue, 8 May 2001 22:37:41 PDT
From: Sheridan George

OK online help desk. This one may be hard to figure out and fix over the net but here goes.

All of a sudden my main computer stops doing its thing about every two minutes. This stopped situation lasts for about 15 seconds. During that time the hard drive light stays on (one of the 4 drives can be heard rattling) and the CPU meter in Warp Center goes to no activity (yes, down to nothing). If I'm typing during this time all the keystrokes are captured and when the spasm passes all the letters are sent to the screen. (Once when I was typing in Star Office it did not seem to be affected.) Letters are sent to the screen even when the drive is rattling.

During the condition the courser stops, if I happen to be trying to scroll nothing happens on the first mouse click (until the rattle stops) but if the mouse is clicked again the Window List box opens.

I have closed all programs including Warp Center and the HD rattle continues every two minutes (timed on a watch). After several hours the HD rattle will start coming more often than two minutes.

Now I know Steven L's first question will be what were you doing when this condition started. The standard answer is -- nothing. The problem is I didn't relate the stopping to the rattling (it's a quiet rattle) of the HD for several days because Netscape simply stops on its own from time to time. It was only when I realized that it was a regular stopping that I started putting things together.

I think I tried a diagnostic program from Hobbes a week or two before I caught on to what was happening. That program was supposed to check out my system and report about the CPU, motherboard, accessory boards, memory, and such. I didn't think it did much so I discarded it. I do not remember its name.

This machine is home built and has been giving almost faultless service for two years. It is running FP10.

I don't know what questions you need answered to get an idea of what is wrong. So, ask away.

Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 09:50:41 PDT
From: Peter Skye

Sheridan George wrote:
>
> All of a sudden my main computer stops doing its thing about every two minutes.

Sheridan's post was a month ago, and I had a similar problem.

Yesterday I saw a newsgroup note to delete the NETSCAPE.HST file. I tried it and the whole system runs much better now.

Close Netscape, run DIR NETSCAPE.HST /S to find the file, then either rename it (NETSCAPE.HST.OLD) or delete it. I had to restart Netscape twice but after that it runs great.

My NETSCAPE.HST file was 10 MB in size. I looked in it before deleting it and it appears to be some kind of unnecessary history file. It's already back up to 164 KB.

Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 17:29:54 PDT
From: Tom Brown

You should be able to fix this problem permanently by clicking (in Netscape):

Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 19:55:03 PDT
From: Steven Levine

on 06/03/01 at 09:50 AM, Peter Skye said:
>
>My NETSCAPE.HST file was 10 MB in size. I looked in it before deleting
>it and it appears to be some kind of unnecessary history file. It's
>already back up to 164 KB.

It serves a purpose and you can control its size. However, if the index gets corrupted, it will grow beyond a useful size.

Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2001 23:19:01 PDT
From: Peter Skye

Peter Skye wrote:
>
> delete the NETSCAPE.HST file.

I just benchmarked Netscape's time to load my personal home page. With the old 10 MB NETSCAPE.HST file it took 5 minutes. After I deleted NETSCAPE.HST it took 46 seconds. What a difference!

Here's what seems to be happening. The NETSCAPE.HST file apparently holds your recently-visited sites so Netscape can "highlight" the page links in a different color. But with 10 MB of links to check, any page that has a lot of links will take a *long* time to check because every link on the page has to be checked against the entire 10 MB file. The file is almost certainly kept in memory, so this would explain why the system "hangs" for long periods -- Netscape is busily checking the page links against the history file.

My personal home page is just over a megabyte and is entirely links (it's a huge bookmark file). *So*, every link in the 1 MB home page has to be checked against the 10 MB history file. Zonk! Lots of cpu time for the checking, and it takes 5 minutes to load. After deleting NETSCAPE.HST the check time is very small and the system is fast and responsive.

All of a sudden it's a pleasure again to use Netscape 4.61.

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