Tuesday, January 22, 2008 

Sporadic updates.

Updates are likely to be sporadic until I can work out/fix whatever it is that's wrong with this hopeless machine loosely known as a computer. I've battled with it suddenly deciding to crash for no apparent reason for the best part of six months, with there being no explanation in the events log, no blue screen (the only real clue being that the screen resolution drops and then locks while going black), and having run both memory tests and most recently SpinRite on the hard drive, nothing apparently wrong with either of them. The reboots over the last couple of days have increased from around once a day to every half an hour, and so I finally formatted to see if the problem was something conflicting within Windows itself. After spending the best part of today getting back up and running, the problem is if anything worse than before.

Going by a process of elimination, the next step is to replace the RAM, then the hard drive, then to throw the whole fucking thing out the window, all with money I don't have. Wish me something approaching luck.

Update: Well, fingers crossed, and uptime currently is only just crossed the 2 hour mark, but a change of RAM seems to have ended the previous almost guaranteed crashes from working with Firefox with a load of tabs open whilst also using foobar.

Update 2: Two crashes later (although I'm uncertain about the second one) and it seems it wasn't the RAM. I've unplugged everything, plugged it back in, cleaned out the dust the best I can, swapped over the IDE cables in case they're somehow responsible, have left the case off to see if it was overheating but I didn't think it was to begin with, and am now somewhat stumped, although it does seem to be running better for the moment. Short of taking it somewhere and being charged through the nose at least. If it continues crashing I might just be tempted to try ubuntu after all.

Update 3: I'm amazed, but the swapping of the IDE cables seems to have worked. No crashes this evening at all. It's just incredibly aggravating that it was something seemingly so simple all along.

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