Slowcoach
Over the past month or so I've been the victim of a couple of odd issues of speed. My, so far as I now absolutely up-to-date Flash plug-in now simply does nothing until my computer has been running for at least ten minutes. Clicking to run a clip on the BBC web site, for example, simply results in a black box. Returning to the same link perhaps 10 minutes later and it works perfectly and continues to do so thereafter. There have been no changes of permissions or suchlike whatsoever in the meantime. This doesn't just apply to the BBC but, like a typical ex-pat Brit, the first thing I do every morning is consult the news on the BBC so that's where I notice this new problem every day.
Being a Pale Mooner, I started to use DuckDuckGo about a year or so ago and all seemed fine. Recently DuckDuckGo has taken around thirty seconds to provide its opening page. Slightly unlike the Flash issue above, it doesn't matter for how long I've been working but perhaps 10 to 20 minutes after first accessing DuckDuckGo in each browsing session, it starts to open straight away each time, just as it did for many months up until a couple of months ago. Being an unavoidably suspicious sort of chap I couldn't avoid the sensation that perhaps it was being interfered with as part of an effort by a competitor to stymie the smooth operation of the browser which has been promoting DuckDuckGo.
I still haven't got so far as to fashion my tinfoil hat but am I being neurotic? Has anybody else noticed these issues, or other similar ones? Is there, perhaps, a solution to each of them?