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Personal: Technical Difficulties II

[Technical Difficulties]Well, I think I may have sorted the technical difficulties I’ve been suffering with my home Windows 2000 Professional PC. After burning off over 20 CDs worth of data (leaving my main hard drive nearly half cleared or half full: whichever way you look at it), running scan disc, disabling services, re-installing and de-installing device drivers, removing programs, attempting a defrag of the hard drive (it had 40% free space at the point – Defrag wasn’t showing an ounce of “white free space” though) and many many many other things: my machine now seems to be stablish. It’s working, I’m connected to the Internet and it hasn’t yet crashed.

Hopefully when I watch the 300th episode of The Simpsons [Order from Amazon.co.uk] it’ll be able to play the entire episode for me instead of totally freezing at arbitrary points. Fingers crossed! Of course, if it does work, I won’t have too much of a clue about what the problem is (I had to reset every single log file I could find to try and help the diagnostics) – but as I’m considering buying a second PC and making it dualboot with Windows and Linux (which variant of Linux though is still undecided) it may be a moot point.

In other news: I’m not feeling too good. Yesterday, I was in bed practically shivering even though the heating was on maximum – had a “head cold” all day at work and kept on feeling faint. I talked to both my parents this evening: my Dad is currently off work with the flu/cold and my Mother has Tonsillitis – I was with them both for 3.5hours on Monday for my sister’s 18th birthday… Co-incidence? Hmmm – we’ll see. I’m just going to have another Lemsip before I take a nice long relaxing soaking hot bath: thank deity it’s the weekend tomorrow. Time for me to recover!

3 Comments

  1. Oh, I hope you do get better.

    🙂

  2. How old is this computer? I had a harddrive that lasted for about 4 years and a few months. At that time – various errors started coming up – giving me a few months to back everything up before it totally failed.

    My opinion on that is that the most cost effective thing in those circumstances to do is either:

    a) buy a new replacement harddrive and recover from backed up data

    b) buy a new harddrive and just reinstall Windows (+ device drivers) and a folder of any work/ personal documents you wish to keep

    Fiddling about trying to fix failling hardware (unless you’re paying someone else to do it) – although it can be well – enjoyable – is well – an unproductive use of time….

    Time that could be spent either working or doing other things.

  3. It doesn’t seem to be a hardware failure – it’s looking more like device driver related. The “fix” didn’t work: I managed to watch episode 300, but when attempting to watch number 301 in the early hours of this morning it crashed again… I’ve now deinstalled WinAmp and Windows Media Player and I’m going to try and see if that’s made any difference.

    I’ve got two hard drives as it is – but it’s just clearing some space on them that’s posing difficulties: I’ve burnt off over 30 CDs this week and I haven’t even cleared half of a single drive yet 🙁

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