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Flash Player 10 freezes my computer

New Here ,
Jun 27, 2009 Jun 27, 2009

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I'm running Windows XP SP3 with Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.1 and Flash Player 10.
I am having persistent freezing anytime I browse a webpage (in either browser) containing any type of flash content.
I'll either have Internet Explorer 8 crash completely telling me there's an problem with flash10b.ocx, or even worse, my entire system will lock up. Forcing a reboot.

I'm just wondering if anyone else is encountering this same issue with the same setup?

Kind Regards
Chris.

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Jun 27, 2009 Jun 27, 2009

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Cntl-Alt-Del doesn't work?  If so, you're looking at a problem with a low level driver (BIOS level) or bad hardware.

Applications cannot cause Linux, MacOS or Windows to completely lock up - only low level drivers and hardware can do that.

The crash could be due to the Flash Player - if you can gather some details, you may want to write it up at http://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/

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New Here ,
Jun 27, 2009 Jun 27, 2009

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Chris Cox wrote:

Cntl-Alt-Del doesn't work?  If so, you're looking at a problem with a low level driver (BIOS level) or bad hardware.

Applications cannot cause Linux, MacOS or Windows to completely lock up - only low level drivers and hardware can do that.

The crash could be due to the Flash Player - if you can gather some details, you may want to write it up at http://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer/

Thankyou for your rapid response Chris.

You have touched on one of the other possible causes I suspected. I have an ATI HD4870X2 that is notorious for over heating and having numerous problems. I do keep my catalyst drivers up to date, I figure the catalyst drivers may have problems with flash. The crashes only occur when I'm viewing flash content, not when I'm doing anything else that would  be considered graphic intensive. Due to the overheating common with the card I believe it might be my graphics actual card and not the driver.

Have you had any faults reported with ATI cards crashing while flash content is viewed?

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Jun 29, 2009 Jun 29, 2009

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I'm not on the Flash Player team - so I'm not sure what other reports they may have.

But an overheating card shouldn't be common, and most likely means a bad card (bad heatsink, bad chip, etc.).

There are a number of other system components (vector instructions on the CPU, graphics memory bus, etc.) that might also be pushed hard while viewing Flash video.  It could even be the power supply is insufficient to keep the GPU running when playing video.

I'd check the power usage and the PSU first, then see if you can replace the video card (even with a borrowed one) and see if the problem goes away.  If the problem is still there with a new video card, then you have to start isolating other system components to find the culprit.  My usual troubleshooting order is: disconnect every drive I don't need, replace video card, replace RAM, replace CPU, replace motherboard, throw the case through the window and see if I can hit the dumpster from 10 stories up.

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Community Beginner ,
Apr 11, 2013 Apr 11, 2013

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Searched all over and best suggestion I could find was this, and it didn't work either:

[Tools] >[Options] >[Advanced] >[General] > []Use hardware acceleration when available

The theory is you remove the possibility of video card driver issues.  Sounds good but in my case had no affect.  Flash player still froze my entire PC on random occasions when I try to start a video.  Every other post I could find just had dumb comments suggesting uninstall/reinstall which as we all know is how we got into this freezing issue in the first place.  Adobe did something back around the release of ver 10.x and I have been having this problem with each new release ever since.

So, it occured to me ... what if there was a wasy to prevent the browser and flash player from using all my processors.  I have a dual quad bla bla whatever processor -- single unit that shows and operates as 4 processors in Windows.  So I ran a search to see if I could find a utility to manage processsor assignment for specific programs, like "my browser".  Well, I found a small selection of free utilities.  One in partitular from a reputable source that seems to do the trick.  Its from Tom's Hardware and was actually written by their programmer (Daniel Schuhmann) so you know its "clean":

Article:  http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/bang-dual-processing-buck,815.html

The download link they provide there is broken and they seem unwilling to fix it but this is a working link direct from Tom's Hardware:

http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2004/05/28/getting_more_bang_out_of_your_dual_processing_buck/taskass...

Filename: taskassign.zip

MD5SUM: 9653e5d257e8af436359a0c9558c60ce

Now, in my case, I only want to be sure flash cannot freeze me out of every resource and *FORCE* me to do a cold boot, so I used the process affinity manager to limit my browser to 3 processors

[ ] CPU 0

CPU 1

CPU 2

CPU 3

And for whatever reason I have not had any Flash Player CPU freezing afflictions since. Not even a burp so maybe you can also get possitive results with "THG Task Assignment Manager" too.  If your PC has an older processor you may only show 2 CPUs when you run the utility, in which case you could try cutting out just one of the two:

[ ] CPU 0

CPU 1

NOTE: You must have the utility running *before* you open your browser, and you must leave it running while you browser and watch vids.  Unfortunately they did not give us a 'Minimize' button so I just launch it, push it off the edge of the screen and then open my browser.  Ohter CPU affinity managers are available as mentioned earlier but I selected this one because it has the smallest footprint (low resource demands) and all the control I need.

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