Pwnboxer just sits there

[Onariz]

Hi,
Hmm well I was going to post about pwnboxer mostly loading then not showing the news and being unresponsive however in taking the time to write that post it suddenly worked again.
As a test I closed it and it is just taking about 3-5mins to load that news page and be usable... I am guessing it also somewhere along the way is checking the authenticity of my computer ID and registration.
Dunno if it is just me if others are getting it too ... but I figure it's prolly a transient problem that is due to some network lag or something but thought I might as well post as I closed it to see if it would open with it's usually speed and found that no it isn't so I had five mins to kill.
Yep it just popped up againafter about 3-5mins so who knows.

[Tim]

Sounds like something on your PC is slowing down? You try rebooting?

What are your specs?

[Onariz]

Amd 6x 3.2, 8GB Ram, 3x2TB HD, Nvidia 480. Running windows 7 64

I had just upgraded on the Saturday morning and after reregistering had no problems on the weekend just Last night.
I tried rebooting and redownloading, the 5min pause seems more like q network issue than anything else and hopefully it will just clear itself up... I could try from my laptop to see if it hangs inthe same way when I get back from work.

[Tim]

Yea it sounds a lot like some sort of network/cpu issue. I tested Pwnboxer just now on a cell phone internet connect it it went smoking fast.

[Onariz]

So I found the "solution" ... which I guess has something to do with how the application builds the machine ID..

I had put an SD card into the side of my Dell monitor and not thought anything of it was just sorting through some old flash cards ... the card is not readable due to I am guessing the built in flash reader not supporting the 8GB SD cards and so being typically windows it take 3mins or so of staring at it to realise the card cannot be read during which time explorer sits there thinking hard.

I presume that something happens when you first load Pwnboxer that causes the computer to checks the drives or something as this is what was causing the 3-5min pause on loading.

It never occurred to me that the two things would be linked as why would they be... and nothing else on the system was affected... however once figuring out the problem it is pretty easy to replicate so I am fairly sure this was the issue, in the same way that if you full out the SD card explorer instantly realises that there is no disk and it responds again Pwnboxer loads the news page as soon as I pull out the card.

Tried it a few times to be sure and with no card loads instantly, with the card in it pauses for the 3-5mins and if I pull the card it immediately unfreezes and works normally again...

Presumably this makes a bit more sense to you than I as to why this happens but card out and all is good... well apart from Manno being down for 24 hrs

[Tim]

Actually you are close Pwnboxer utilizes some windows API to build its unique ID, and it sounds like windows is having problems reading that SD card, causing the windows ID API to slow down, causing PB to slow down.

Dump the SD and sail home free!