In which it’s that time of year again!
About every year, Windows gets reinstalled on my personal computer.
This is not because I enjoy reinstalling Windows, oh no. It’s because it shits the bed about every twelve months and has to be reinstalled.
My darling Eee PC 900HA (my baby, my littlest, my daily driver) started hanging ultra mega hard* about a week ago, and for various reasons – namely drunkenness and debauchery, plus a lot of gigging – I didn’t get it fixed right away.
My brother took a look at it and agreed with me that the issue wasn’t, in fact, hardware failure (it’s so great to have a geek next door!) which was lovely because of course the thing’s a month out of warranty.
I could only tweet from my phone because my iPod Touch battery died since I couldn’t plug it into the netbook. My Twitter, blog, and Facebook presence suffered mightily, and don’t even get me started on my lack of coherent job search. I also failed to help a friend’s friend with his computer shopping, missed a bunch of FB memes of varying hilarity, am way behind on my email, and didn’t manage to properly thank PJ for the unexpected parcel full of wool yarn and bath salts.
My Internet withdrawal finally got to the part with the DTs and drooling, so today I borrowed from my brother, who is awesome, a giant external hard drive and his laptop.
Right now I’m backing up my data onto the external drive while I apply for about six jobs via the laptop. (I’m afraid that one of the “jobs” was a bogus phishing attempt and I gave them my fucking email address and phone number before I figured it out. Creeps! A pox on their houses!)
When the backup completes I’ll wipe the Eee PC clean, format it, partition it, install Windows, download service packs, download updates, install applications, and then transfer my data back onto it. And then? Then I’ll have normal, regular, working, non-crashing, non-OMFG-THIS-IS-SO-PISSING-ME-OFF! access to the Internet, yea verily, and it shall Be Good!
*Geeky Details: I installed .NET the day before the issue became apparent; not sure if that’s related. Netbook booted up fine, boot booster was running, all good. Windows loaded, apps loaded. Used the thing and it would just… hang. No drive activity at all. Forever, until hard-booted. Uptime varied from a few minutes to half an hour. I checked my tools and it seemed there was a lot of services.exe activity, but there was also more ‘net activity than I’d normally expect. Virus? Full scans found no viruses or rootkits. After each hang, it would reboot as if it hadn’t been turned off improperly (save once, the second time, when scandisk told me it had had to repair a bunch of kernel files). If I turned it on and didn’t launch any applications, it would run almost indefinitely, but all the apps I ran – Firefix, iTunes, Calibre, even Process Explorer – would cause it to just seize up. It hasn’t seized once during the hour-plus process of copying files to the external drive. A registry cleaner app told me my registry was a hot tranny mess. I blame Canada.
5 Responses to Offline, or, Why I May Have Lamed Out On You Recently
Friends
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- Jazzy Chad
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Glad you’re back. We missed you!
And I you! -m
Glad you got the package! Also glad I didn’t try whining to you about MY computer problems. Which were huge and ended with me getting a whole different box. Effing heck.
Welcome back.
New computer FTW! -m
A Windows PC is about as reliable as it’s uses. At my current job I talk to almost exclusively home users with some small business users added for flavor and can tell you that a family computer I could fully expect needing wiped once a year but a computer that is almost exclusively used by one person shouldnt need it unless said person is doing high risk behavior like downloading from limewire/frostwire etc. My desktop was running on the same install of XP 64bit until a few weeks ago when I bought windows 7 for it, my pc before that was running on the same install of XP home for about 4 years. And I’m brutal, big fat penis in the pooper brutal, with my pcs. I dont reboot for weeks or months at a time, I put off windows updates until I feel like it, I’m always installing/uninstalling new programs, I run virtual machines to test new antivirus software. I will say that there was a new windows update that nuked quite a few PC’s due to from what I can find a infected copy of atapi.sys. I hope things become more stable once your reinstall is done.
I think it was a reaction to a Windows Update, a very deep infection that I was unable to find with any tool, or some weird side effect of installing .NET (which makes no sense, but there it is). Reinstalling Windows has made it all bettah. 🙂 -m
Just to follow up here behind Pavix, my latest ThinkPad has Windows 7. Although skeptical at first, I’m finding that I really like it: Smooth, lightweight and obedient. Whenever you get the funds, you might look into it.
I really need to embrace versions of Windows newer than XP, I just keep not doing it. I coulda put Vista Ultimate on here, but didn’t. Argh! -m
There doesn’t need to be a deep rooted virus to cause your problems with .Net. MS sometimes releases versions that are broken and your symptom sounds like it’s trying to access something in the hardware incorrectly or waiting for a call back from a modem or video card or NIC driver that never comes…so it hangs. Go get updates to all the drivers for all the hardware on your machine (not that hard to do since nearly all hardware manufacturers have web sites). Since you’re at a fresh install of the OS, it’s a good time to do it. Even the Mtrbd might have updates to drivers.
I don’t even know that it was .NET. All better now, though. -m