Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 January 23

Welcome to the Wikipedia Computing Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

January 23

Internet Explorer showing blank tab and grayed out menu items

I'm running Internet Explorer 10 (I think) on Windows. For whatever reason, a few days ago Internet Explorer just has a blank tab with no title and no address and most of the menu items under button in the shape of a gear are grayed out. How do I fix this? — Melab±1 ☎ 03:46, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

fr — Preceding unsigned comment added by Yoshichan255 (talk • contribs) 07:57, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

OS X 10.6.8, permissions, Java

I seem to be in charge of the office Mac, which has OS X 10.6.8. It exhibited no problems until a couple of months ago, whereupon it started to display the marble of doom a lot. Even something as trivial as clicking the edit tab to write this would have provoked the twirling umbrella, as the computer seemed to think "Well, hmm, let me see if I really want to do this for you."

Neither Activity Monitor nor Console showed any problem that was blazingly obvious. I read up on Mac sluggishness and learned that widely advertised "cleaning" software was snakeoil whereas OnyX might be good. I installed it and ran it. Its start-up checking procedure detected no disc problem. I didn't quite know what to do with it after that, and the only menu option that looked as if it might be relevant was file permissions. I ran that. Fixing file permissions took a long time, but afterward the computer ran fast. Excellent!

But the damn computer soon reverts to its sluggish state. (1) I thereupon run OnyX; (2) OnyX (permissions) finds problems and fixes them; (3) the computer runs fast but after a day or so slows down intolerably; (4) yawn, GOTO (1).

OnyX provides a dump of the names of the rogue files. These mean little or nothing to me. There's always a lot related to Java, e.g. "System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Classes/dt.jar". There's always [human] language-specific stuff, e.g. "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support/Remote Desktop Message.app/Contents/Resources/Italian.lproj/UIAgent.nib"; I haven't consciously used these languages and I doubt that anybody else has either.

I don't know if Java is part of the problem or just part of the symptoms. Uninstalling it and reinstalling a freshly downloaded version seems harmless at worst and imaginally beneficial. But I don't even know where it is: all I see is Java Preferences.app, which says that the computer has version 1.6.0_65-b14-462 of Java SE 6 64-bit and 32-bit but doesn't offer to check if these are the latest or have any diagnostics option that I can see.

Any suggestions? Morenoodles (talk) 09:09, 23 January 2014 (UTC)