Browser problem: endless loading time

[The Wizard]

What is wget and what does it do? And how would one ping his own router?

And yes, other programs using the Internet (mIRC, Last.fm) continue functioning perfectly. Interestingly enough, muTorrent also freezes up the moment my browser's process freezes up.

What puzzles me is it isn't just IE7/8... Firefox and Chrome get it too. e_e

[Tellos Athenaios]

Wget is a download program that doesn't just give up at the first network problem (it can reconnect and resume broken downloads for instance). There is a windows version, it is used for instance in the windows version of Jigdo.

You would want to try it like this:

wget -c "http://domain/path/to/download/file" -O NUL

Or:

wget /c "http://domain/path/to/download/file" /O NUL

That command attempts to download the file given after -c and sends it to the NULL device (on DOS/NT aka “Windows”). Any errors found in the output on the cmd/shell will help ‘debug’ your problem.

(Note: I do not know whether or not the Windows version of wget uses the DOS style /flag instead of the Unix style -flag for passing parameters/options.)

Ping is a tool to check if routers/servers are ‘online’ and responsive: no need to download anything, simply use:

ping address

From the command line; let it run a while then type Ctrl C to stop it: it should list how successful it has been at contacting <address> (number of packets dropped / number of packets sent) as well as how much time it took (latency) to contact <address> on average.

[The Wizard]

I think I may have found the problem... my anti-virus software's (avast! 4.8) web scanning module. I turned it off yesterday evening after reading about similar problems with McAfee's SiteAware and AVG's web scanner and have as of yet not encountered any freezes since. I'll continue doing so today to see if this situation persists.

I'm thinking it may either be the module itself or a conflict between it and my firewall (ZoneAlarm), because in ZA Program Control I saw that the web scanning thing wasn't completely OK'd by the firewall (it still had to ask me for permission upon trying to access the trusted zone).