Originally Posted by queasy27

Thanks, everyone! The laptop started running extremely slowly this week -- was getting page load and timeout errors for almost every site. Couldn't stream, etc. I ran four different virus removal tools and nothing was found. I tried a system restore but that didn't help so I was hoping to start over using the emergency disc and full system image backup.

This was only happening on one laptop (my favorite!), so it wasn't related to global network connectivity issues. Hours of troubleshooting later, I finally noticed that the slowdowns started when I opened IE, then saw that my ad blocker was using huge amounts of memory. I uninstalled that and things seem to be back to normal. Except, of course, for a few preferences and settings I messed up trying various fixes. Yeesh.

I'm partial to the way IE handles bookmarks/favorites, but things are starting to break all over the place and sites are discontinuing support, so I really need to give it up.

Speaking of browsers, has anyone noticed any improvement with FF Quantum? I've had several things break, but it remains a huge memory hog and not noticeably faster. I still like its UI a little better than Chrome or Opera, though.