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Update: Since this article was published when Adobe Flash 10.1 was still in beta,  it is probably no longer relevant to current Adobe Flash problems.

This particular problem is quite nasty. It only happened to me recently and here are some tips to overcome it, although it cannot be 100% solved.

Your computer may be suffering from this malaise without you being aware of it.

Recently I noticed that my computer has slowed down considerably. The problem was particularly acute when I was playing a certain Facebook Flash game in Google Chrome. Blaming the problem on an unoptimized Flash game running on Google Chrome, I did not bother fixing it until it got more severe. Okay – until a cute female friend asked for my help…. that’s when I decided that it’s really a problem worth looking into ;)

The Cause

So I ran the game in Firefox and Internet Explorer and found out that the problem is not any fault of Google’s. Investigating further, I finally followed the trail to some sites where people congregated and compared notes on Adobe Flash 9 and 10, like this one here.

And I found out that there are so many tormented souls like me out there!

Others have noticed this sluggishness running Youtube videos. These people have 3 GHz cpus and 4 GB memory but they have the same problem. Youtube is known to work fine in mobile devices running Firefox in only 256MB of available memory space – try googling Nokia N900 – so it cannot be due to people’s computer being old and unable to deal with Adobe’s Flash requirements.

Many have speculated that Adobe Flash’s resource hogging is due to Adobe Flash being a poorly written program, with unoptimized code. Some even say that this is a new version of the Microsoft-Intel conspiracy theory where these giant corporations worked together, to get us to fork out more of our hard-earned money so that we have to buy more computers and help the IT industry prosper.

The Fix:

1. Uninstall Adobe Flash

Really important! You can skip step 2 but not this!

2. Get the beta version, Adobe Flash 10.1 Beta.

If you don’t want to run this beta version, then reinstall the current version at http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/. Just remember NOT to get the free McAfee security app.

After the uninstalling and reinstalling, I find that my Facebook game is more responsive now – my friend says hers is playable now and my Facebook gaming life has improved – I get to spend as little time on it as possible :)

I won’t say that it’s 100% solved – I still notice that Adobe Flash leaks memory frequently in Firefox and Google Chrome. To resolve this, feel free to restart the slow responding browser or wait for my next article on how to identify and close the memory leak.

Hopefully, this short guide here can solve your problem. If not, then your problem may be a different one or is more severe than this and I can’t really help you but direct you to this article and see for yourself that you are not alone in this.

Happy gaming!

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