Thursday, February 5, 2009

Part 23: What the Firefox?

Firefox wouldn't respond, so I selected it on the bottom tab and closed it.

Then I clicked on a link to reopen it, and several things happened, none of them intuitive:

1. Firefox didn't open.

2. Windows opened an explorer dialogue, asking me where I wanted to save the link. (Excuse me? I want to view the bleedin' link!)

3. Windows popped up a cryptic error message, informing me that

Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.


Okay, so I stopped the Firefox process. It disappeared off my task bar. But it was still going on, somewhere, in space. Had I probably wanted to, I could have Ctrl-Alt-Deleted my way to the task manager, and from there tried to end the process, which generally just creates "end task" "applications" which are "not responding." I've been down that road. So the other option is to, what, restart my computer? Sure, that might work. But more thank likely, I'd enter the Catch-22 of the Windows universe, and be told that I can not shut down my computer until I end Firefox.

That seems like backwards logic to me...

*****

Update: It still won't open. I opened the task manager. It shows no task for Firefox. Lovely.

2 comments:

T3chDoc said...

I have no idea what you do to your computers, but wow. You definitely need to be using an operating system with less user input. As far as I can tell from your blog, that would greatly increase your computers "up-time".

Ari said...

The thing is, of course, that I do nothing to my computer. I run basically three programs at work: Firefox, Outlook (with Xobni, which I love) and Excel. If need be I'll run iTunes, Safari and some accessories (paint, notepad) and some awful extension which creates PDFs, something I don't have to worry about on a Mac.

Switching to a proper OS would greatly increase my computer's "up-time" and my productivity. And, uh, I would waste less time blogging.