Jim, just a tiny overview:

Hard disk (HDD)

It won’t help. Your Hard Disk is made up of tiny “sectors”. Over time, and as you install and delete things your programs will become fragmented, in other words, split into pieces. This causes access times to be increased because it has to “search” for each segment of the program to run which can degrade system performance. Hard disk sectors can, and do become corrupted or damaged over time, leaving them useless. If you have an important bit of a program installed on one of these bad sectors then that program may not run, or if it does it may crash. Eventually as the Hard disk breaks down it will just fail (not very common, but happens).

Virtual Memory

As for virtual memory, this could be one of your issues if programs like Chrome are crashing alot. This will be caused by a full, or nearly full HDD (Hard Drive). You can increase the size of your virtual memory, but this is pointless if your HDD is nearly full. Virtual memory is something your system will use instead of your physical memory (RAM) once all the RAM has been utilised. If you have loads of processes running in the background then your PC is more than likely running out of physical memory (RAM) and is using Virtual Memory (space on your HDD). The best thing to do when this happens is to purchase more RAM (you can never have enough RAM), shut down some running processes, or delete files from your HDD and allocate some more Virtual Memory.

Web Browsers

Personal choice here, but by far and away the best browser out there is Mozilla Firefox. It is amazingly customisable, you can have all your favourite websites in tabs across the top of your browser, you can install brilliant add-ons like Spell Checker, and a great one called lazarus. Have you ever typed a long reply on this forum, or an email only to lose the lot? Lazarus will recover it for you – priceless. You can backup and save your bookmarks, you can save and access your passwords for websites. It is simply brilliant.

Jim

It sounds like your PC needs a damn good overhaul and clean out. I bet you have so many applications running in the background that need sorting out as well. PCs are like humans, you need to keep on top of their health to keep them in good running order.
How many icons do you have on your desktop? It is said that these alone use up 1mb of virtual memory per icon.
If I lived near you I could take your pc away and give it the once over.

Rgds

Dean

Just saw your replies above, Jim. This screen is NOT a virus, it’s just Google Chrome’s new way of having a hissy fit. This could be for a number of reasons, like it’s managed to get corrupted, or you have run out of virtual memory, or it has crashed because you didn’t close it before shutting down your PC.

The fact that it said He’s Dead Jim must have thrown you, but it is nothing to worry about.

Dean

Jim

Don’t panic. Are you using Google Chrome browser? Confirm it here with your PC specifications

Dean

Or maybe it was simply a visual approach, or a non-precision approach. There is no way of telling any parameters from the ground like airspeed etc, too many variables.

usaf

I made a blog on here when I was doing my Commercial Pilot’s License. You can have a read and see what you have in store, but bear in mind this is JAR land (now EASA) and yours will be FAA based I assume?

The blog can be found here

http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=63629

All the very best of luck.

Dean

and others on the forum, think we should go the Australian way, it’s very tough to get in there, as there rules and regs are much tighter than ours.
Jim.
Lincoln .7

I completely agree we should.

Now I am micro managing this I know, but looking at the aviation industry on it’s own, the European Free Labour Laws are flawed, because it has created a one way gravy train. The amount of “foreigners” on our flight decks is staggering, particularly in the low cost carriers. The reason being is that they can easily move freely around Europe and compete for any job they like….why? Because they can speak English. So we are handicapped straight away. Not only would we have to learn 4-5 different languages (and be fluent) to make ourselves eligible for employment abroad, we would be subjected to alot of discrimination because we are not a “national”.
Terms and conditions on the flightdeck are plummeting quicker than the Euro. The reason is the never ending supply of wannabes, particularly foreign who are prepared to sell their souls and work over here for next to nothing, which effectively takes up all the best jobs so that the bottom of the industry cannot move on. There are English pilots working abroad, but the numbers are quite small in relative terms. The aviation fraternity over here have had quite enough of it.

It’s the indigenous population that is largely responsible for the massive benefits bill.

No it isn’t, it is the fault of our dumb arsed, spineless government who let them get away with it.

I am not a reader of the Daily Mail, but I had a copy on the flightdeck once on a long trip, and Richard Littlejohn was correct in his definition of Immigration…

Immigration – def: People brought into the country to do the jobs the CHAVs get paid NOT to do.

Perfectly apt evaluation if you ask me.