"Ian Field" wrote in message
news

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
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"Ian Field" wrote in message
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"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
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"Ian Field" wrote in message
news
"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
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"Lee" wrote in message
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On 14/01/2012 01:45, Arfa Daily wrote:


So anyone else had any problems ? Any of the computah
deep-understanders
on here, got any idea what exactly Avast is doing to cause this
behaviour, or what has started it ?

Arfa

Firstly, if you are using the same isp as you email address, their
news server (or their implementation of it) is known to be flakey on
occasion so it may just be them and the Avast thing is a
coincidence...

Avast used to complain about my ssl connections to Gmail and Eternal
September but since update 6.0.1367 it's been quite happy about
them.




I do use both their mail and news servers by default, and yes, I have
in the past had some 'issues', often a weekends, and usually
associated with server maintenance, upgrading, or migration. I have a
friend who works for them, and I can usually find out if anything has
gone on when there's been a problem.

However, in this case, it does not appear to be server / ISP related.
I did suspect that it might be, so I Googled for another free-access
news server, and put that into Xnews. It behaved exactly the same.

Thanks to all so far for the useful and interesting insights.

Arfa

Xnews on my PC has been playing up for a few days (I don't use Avast).

It started with both sliders at the RHS so it only downloaded a couple
of headers, when I moved the start slider to the LHS it took most of
the day only to fail woth out of memory error.

At each try I halved the start slider until it completed getting
headers and displayed ready - the latest article was dated December.

Then I double checked the finish slider was hard to the RHS and set
the start slider just a smidge to its left, with group/findI was then
able to search the most recent file in my downloads folder and resume
tagging from there on.

Late last year there were problems with one or more virus spammers
uploading *HUGE* numbers of rar files all the same size - Xnews
couldn't handle that many headers!



Hmmm. Oddly enough, I've been having that as well with my Xnews. I just
assumed that it was all part and parcel of the original problem, until
I discovered the Avast connection. I just went and tried a couple of
groups, and same thing, except sliders as far apart as they can go.
This is a pretty quick computer, and the 'net connection is 20 meg so
it will download all those headers in a relatively short space of time,
but of course, they go back a long way,

OTOH; Virginmedia have been sending me emails telling me they've
upgraded certain aspects of the broadband without corresponding price
increases - maybe they've quietly increased the retention of their
binary servers to what Xnews can't handle!


My mate who works for them, told me that they were about to double speeds
a couple of weeks ago. Over the last few days, I have received around 10
emails from them, some being repeats, saying all sorts of contradictory
things. There seems to have been a massive balls-up on who gets what
email, as a few of them have been apologies for wrongly sent emails
regarding speed changes, and telling me to ignore what was said, and that
I would be receiving good news regarding my speed in the next two weeks.

Arfa

I got an apologies for error email too.

And even if they did double my speed, they'd only cap my downloads for 12h
like they usually do if I actually used it!

I'm trying to get headers in Xnews now, the previous attempt with the
sliders pretty close together resulted in headers way back months into
last year but not making it up to today, I've moved the start slider
nearer to the end slider and double checked the end slider is endstopped -
its up to 20% and going painfully slow!



I've just had another weird thing happen on another newsgroup. One thread
I opened had the same kind of post just repeated by everyone and no actual
replies, but that post had come from the previous thread I had been reading.

I've now turned off the newsgroup scanning in Avast, and every post I now
open in that mangled thread appears to be OK, though the mangled ones I've
already opened do not get fixed. (presumably because they are now just
sitting mangled on my hard drive).

Cheers,


Gareth.