DELUSIONS OF CONTROL

More notes from my mental bunker:

January 2010

Rebooting in 2010…

Glad to see the back of 2009 - wouldn't do it over again for anything. Of course, I spent a lot of it tired, and sick, and drunk because I was sick and tired and nothing else seemed to work. So I don't remember that much of it, which is probably a good thing.

… I do remember that it wasn't easy to get drunk by buying straight shots of vodka in China. Apparently they can't handle the idea that you might want straight coke and straight vodka each in their own glass. I found the parts of China I visited on the solar eclipse tour to be highly uninspiring, but perhaps I was in no mood to be inspired. It was enough of an effort just to breathe in the crud-laden air and cough the solid parts back up later.

Computer glitches have kept my productivity well down, long after I should have bounced back from concentrating on the last SAO unit (which flattened me, not least because I was sick for most of it). Instead of processing trip photos, rebuilding databases, keeping in contact with people, writing stories, reviewing things for friends, getting the telescope out and catching up with stuff I promised people I'd do at the beginning of last year, I've become preoccupied with sorting out what has to be one of the vaguest problems I've ever come across.

It started back in November with Windows Movie Maker. I had a few YouTube clips to thread together as background for the OzCanyons Slide Night, so I thought I'd use Movie Maker, since it was there. Silly me. Reasoning of this kind hasn't worked so well for mountain climbing and in computing it's downright ludicrous. Movie Maker seized up constantly. I did eventually get the clips stitched together and then dropped the program like a hot stone. Too late, apparently, as the whole system now randomly seizes... and I'd had the thing perfectly stable for almost a year, right up to the very point I started using Movie Maker. Suddenly my forex plans were on hold and I couldn't even play with my practice account without problems.

Unlike the issue I had early last year which manifested itself at each crash with a BSOD and entries in the Event Viewer (and turned out to be an overheating power supply), this does nothing. The system just… stops. The mouse moves, but the CPU and the System Idle process BOTH drop to 0%. There are no errors and no information about what is happening because nothing IS happening. While it appears to be random, video and sound applications will always cause the failure before long.

So: I've been through the spyware/malware checklist, cleaned the registry, tested the RAM, swapped the hard drives, spent hours scouring the web for info, blown the dust out of the box, put in more fans, updated the video drivers, run windows installer to fix installation errors, tried almost every peripheral including the sound card in and out & the problem is still there (albeit a little less frequently now). I'm now at the point where the expensive & highly time-consuming options must be considered. I have a high-end graphics card (admittedly aging a little but still up there) and unfortunately I can't easily swap it out. I have plenty of RAM, and the CPU is fast and rarely stressed, but there's always a chance one or the other of these might be starting to fail. And I don't want to reinstall XP if I don't have to...

So I'm running procmon.exe in the background to see if I can pick up a pattern. There doesn't seem to be one. Sometimes, it's just had enough.

I know how it feels.

Yileen canyon photos here.

C.A.L.

Jan-December 2009 archived 04-01-2010

Jan-December 2008 archived 23-02-09

July-December 2007 archived 30-03-2008

Jan-June 2007 archived 21-12-2007