(no subject)

My main computer is threatening to die... again.

I couldn't really say what the problem was. I was trying to work on it this morning but I had to leave for work. Same as yesterday.

What it's doing: Thursday morning I couldn't get the anti-virus program to run. So I rebooted. The computer failed to restart, so I turned it off and back on. It spent 30 minutes doing a diagnostic on drive D (the backup drive) fixing files and directories. When I finally got it back up I ran AVG, but I had to go to work.

When I got home AVG had finished running and found nothing. I really haven't found anything since last weekend when I removed all of the spyware. Anyway, the computer seemed fine and I used it the rest of the evening.

This morning, Firefox refused to run. I rebooted. The computer failed to restart. I turned it off and on. It spent 30 minutes doing a diagnostic on drive D, fixing files and directories. Hmmm. This seems quite familiar. Anyway, after all of that it booted up but didn't install all of the programs that it normally installs on startup, and Firefox still wouldn't run. I rebooted again... and it installed even fewer programs on startup, and nothing would run. Hmmm.

And then I had to go to work.

At this point I'm thinking I should backup my e-mail and a couple of other files -- everything else should be backed up -- and then I should do a complete reinstall, as I've been thinking of doing for weeks now.

And if that doesn't work, maybe I need a new computer. It's quite old. Except I don't really want to be buying a new computer right now.

Fun wif komputars

When I got home this afternoon (Friday) I set to work backing up my computer files. I'd done a pretty comprehensive backup just a month ago when I thought I was going to do a wipe & reinstall then, so I only had a few things to back up -- my iTunes music files, story files, e-mail, and a few other things of that nature. Then I went for the big wipe and reinstall.

Then I went for a walk. It was a nice sunny day, and I've failed to walk 3 of the other 5 days this week so I really didn't want to screw up this chance.

When I got back the computer was still installing. At 13 minutes to go, it froze up... mouse froze, everything froze. So I rebooted and started all over again.

At 13 minutes to go, it froze up again. Hmmm.

I called miertam to see what he thought. Could be my drive is dying. Could be a lot of other things. Could be bad memory. He said that it sounded like it could be my 3rd stick of memory, and it's not trying to access the bad memory until that part of the install.

This is, of course, something that's easy to check. Remove two sticks of memory and see if it installs.

And... it installed fine. So, I think I've figured out what the problem was.

It occurs to me that I didn't need to do a full wipe and reinstall after all, if memory was my only problem. However, a clean install certainly isn't a bad thing.

I've just pulled the memory stick and replaced it with my 2nd memory stick... and it boots up fine. I do believe that it's the 3rd stick that is the problem. But I'll have to wait until tomorrow to figure that out or decide what to do about it (maybe get a different stick of memory, or just do without).

*EDIT* Hrm, not sure about that after all. I'm having trouble getting the audio to work, and it froze up on reboot once. Well, we'll just have to see tomorrow.