OT: Last know good Thunderbird version that won't white-screen on Win-7?

I'm running Thunderbird 31.30 under Window 7 ( version 6.1, build 7601, ser vice pack 1) without anything exciting happening. Sometimes an e-mail takes a while to down-load and the relevant window doesn't display any content u ntil the whole e-mail has downloaded, but that's a bad as it gets.

I use Norton for computer security, and it pops up and claims to have done something useful from time to time.

I won't use McAfee AV on any computer.

Joerg - I am using TB 31.3.0 on Win 7 Enterprise, V6.1, Service Pack 1.

No problems.

I thought he had just bought a brand new Dell with Win7 preinstalled and unfortunately a whole bunch of corporate sponsorred nagware that they try to pass off as evaluation copies wanting payment after 60 days.

I wouldn't trust any machine "protected" by McCoffee myself. YMMV

Regards, Martin Brown

Dunno. I read it as "he just upgraded" -- which could mean "bought a new machine with a factory install of W7" *or* "installed W7 over an existing XP/Vista system". I've never had much faith in MS's "upgrade in place" process. Seems rife for things to go bad in unpredictable ways...

I've seen problems with many AV products, over the years. And, from the machines I've been called on to "fix", it appears they are dubious, at best, in providing the protection they advertise.

Are you talking about a momentary slow down lasting a few seconds or so? I am running Windows 8 and I see that with T-bird a lot. Mostly it is not much different from other momentary delays such as when some OS function is thrashing the hard drive for a bit. Sometimes though T-bird will go into its own little frozen mode where I don't see anything maxed out in the Task Manager display and it may last for 5 or 10 seconds, very occasionally longer.

When this happens to me (the longer than 10 second delay) I shut it down and restart T-bird.

I don't get a white screen though, so Windows doesn't think it is frozen.

It doesn't happen to me often enough to be a productivity killer, more of a productivity annoyer.

That is pure nonsense. At one point there was an effort to use the flexibility of T-bird to give it an optional look and feel like Eudora. I think it was called Penelope. But T-bird is totally independent from Eudora and was designed and written without a thought of Eudora which is very clear from the user interface, much less the workings.

I've been using Sophos for many years with good results, also it is free if you are happy downloading a new password every month. But under Windows 8 some of the UI is crippled such as the pop up that lets you update the application checksums when it finds an app that has been updated. Also every time I open Sophos I UAC takes over the entire screen to warn me and get permission to run it. You'd think they could figure out how to get around that sort of thing.

I notice you aren't writing software... :)

My laptop has 16 GB of RAM just so I wouldn't have to think about RAM any more. But the browsers are so RAM hungry that if I have a few dozen tabs open RAM usage gets up to 15 GB. Wow! I don't see any other apps using anything remotely like that much memory including the OS.

So don't blame programmers. Just blame browser programmers. BTW, why didn't you get 16 or 32 GB of RAM? Are you planning to throw away this machine in 6 months?

This is basically just aggressive caching AIUI. The memory is still available for other programs if they need it. The browsers just use memory that is not being used for anything else. In case you want to suddenly go back 200 pages in your browsing history then the website is there, pre-rendered. If you only had 4G of RAM the browser would still work fine.

I still brought it to its knees by running "make -j" to build some downloaded software. I think there were about 1000 instances of gcc going simultaneously before it ground to a virtual halt :)

before cookies and all the spam and data mining horseshit, it didn't happen either. Then again, not too bright to think of having 10 or 20 or

Why test the system?

However, IF you really wanted performance, then you should run your 16GB multi-tabbed environment under a Linux kernel. Gets rid of all that "half your CPU cycles anti-spam-anti-virus 'front end'. To hell with the junk in yout trunk! Look at that belly!

Windows is disgusting, and STILL VULNERABLE. WAKE UP PEOPLE!

Pretty cool. Under Windows or Linux? (I am betting the latter).

I use compiling the MAME emulator package. Get all the dependencies and the build takes quite a while on my 4 core i3 laptop. I can't remember if I ever compiled it on my i7 3930k 12 core yet.

But that is what I use now, instead of kernel compiles, which used to be my "fun benchmark tool".

Yup. Sometimes more than just a few seconds.

I have pretty much accepted that as well. It's a newly introduced annoyance, probably thanks to a "modern" OS.

... Oh! Need to do even more mountain biking.

When I retire I try Linux again.

During these tests none (turned it off, just to make sure).

I get the occasional white-screen. It's not full white, more milky where you can still see the email text through a thick haze. But it will not react to any keyboard input then. So now there are certain actions I only do before brief or longer breaks.

I am aware of all of that and regularly cull emails to keep the file sizes reasonable.

Aha! Thanks.

Right now it's all turned off. But I will ditch it because it messes wit the Windows firewall and I do not like it when other SW cut into my decision making.

Yes linux, natively (compiling kicad). Instructions said to type "make" so I thought I would cleverly speed things up a bit with "-j", meaning roughly "compile in parallel using as many processes as you like". Should have used "-j8" or similar so as to limit it to one per (hyperthread) core.

Laptop is a i7-4900mq (thinkpad w540). It really flies.

Yes.

Only has 1-year pre-paid McAfee and that's turned off for such tests. There is an MS-Office nagware on it as well but it is mostly quiet. Those two I could not refuse during ordering.

Windows 7 managed to refuse my old Logitech Quickcam. Same thing as with the printer, no error messages, it just plain don't work. Same for the microphone. Great.

I use V24 right now. It runs somewhat ok, or let's say well enough for now as long as I don't do certain things.