Browsers unuseable, hangs

[jzakiya]

All my browsers (Firefox, Chromium, Konqueror) have now gotten to the
point where they are effectively unuseable. This problem started about
a week ago, but has gotten worse now.

After I load a browser, it will operate as normal, but then after a certain
time/point, when I try to load a page, or just scroll within a page, the
browser just hangs, and the disk light comes/stays on indicating disk
thrashing. The only way to reasonably end this process is to just turn
my laptop off.

To check to make sure I didn't have a disk problem, or some other issue,
I rebooted with a PCLOS Live CD. I was able to browse normally that way.
To further test my laptop, I booted into XP, and FF/Chromium work without
any problem with XP.

So, it's not hardware, its some software problem within PCLOS.
(I'm writing with Chromium on XP) :-(

To check if I had some virus/malware problem, I installed clamav via synaptic.
However, clamav doesn't show up in the programs menu, and I can't get it
to start via the command line either.

So, how do I run clamav after I install it?

When I run other apps (editors, games, utilities, etc) I experience no problems.
The problem seems to be specifically related to accessing the internet when
using a browser (no problem with Skype or Pidgin either).

Any suggestion to trouble shooting this (besides reinstalling a clean system)?

[exploder]

Just a suggestion, but you might try turning off IPV6 or maybe try using Bleachbit to clean things up and see if that improves things.

[kernowyon]

Personally, I would run a memory test, such as Memtest. It may be the case that the RAM is starting to fail - I have seen it before on systems which seem OK but when the RAM is tested, it is failing. Under light loads, the RAM is OK, but once a system has been running for a while, it fails. Linux and XP use memory in different ways, which may explain why the XP isn't getting the same issue (yet).

[Dragynn]

To check if I had some virus/malware problem, I installed clamav via synaptic.
However, clamav doesn't show up in the programs menu, and I can't get it
to start via the command line either.

So, how do I run clamav after I install it?

Try adding clamtk, the gui for clam from the repo. be sure and uncomment the appropriate line in freshclam.conf to enable signature updates.