I first noticed it about a year ago, and its been getting steadily worse: more and more websites are just freezing up after I get in. They display a splash page and then simply lock up. I can usually get out, but sometimes I have to get out of my browser, or even control-alt-delete. Afterwards, I sometimes (but not always)have trouble rebooting my browser. Other times, I can get into these sites if I wait a long time, but they are very slow.

These sites are reputable operations, usually news or science sites. Others, let me right in without any problem (I never have trouble with Habzone, NSDIC or the Neven Blog, a boating site I visit often, or many others which I frequent several times a day.), so I don’t think I have malware problems. I have Webroot guarding my system, and it doesn’t seem to be finding evidence of attacks. But most of the big newspaper or TV network pages I don’t bother to even try any more; I read the headline, and then it locks up tight. These all seem to be heavily used pages with wide readership, I don’t think its malware, I suspect they have features my system is too slow to deal with.

I have an old system, and a Windows XP Pro OS. My wife’s system is newer and faster, and runs Windows 10, but we are on the same router. She has no problems. My wife says my system is just old and out of date, but if that was the case wouldn’t all of the internet be similarly affected? One other clue, I don’t have any trouble accessing Youtube.

One thing I notice the bad sites all seem to have in common is that they all carry advertising, and all display the little rectangle badge icons that indicate they link to Twitter (the bird), Facebook, (the l/c letter “f”) and several others (there seem to be 4 or 5 of them in all, but since I never go to social media, I don’t recognize the others) Maybe its just a coincidence, but my lockouts seem to usually come on sites that have connection to these services.

Am I missing something obvious?