I (H)ATE My Computer!

So who says these things are only just machines? Right when you need them the most they always let you down!

For crying out loud. I returned from holiday only to find that my friggin ‘puter was suffering from more than a little indigestion (burrrp).

Excuse me, but what really annoyed me about it was there were no error messages. No blue screen of death. No lame Windows messages asking my permission to send information to Microsoft. It just froze. Or it would cough, wheeze and regurgitate itself, rebooting every few minutes or so making it impossible to diagnose.

I’d heard of a new virus that might be the cause of the reboot problem, but nothing showed up after feeding it two anti-virus scans, a healthy dose of vitamin C and Dr. Norton’s w32.sasser.worm fix tool. Having never acquired a taste for things that wriggle, I even checked for trojans with A 2 but there were no rogue horses to be found (at least according to Brad Pitt).

Ad-aware only consumed a few tasty cookies and Spybot said it had found a DSO exploit in IE. BUT after supposedly fixing it, a second and third scan confirmed that it was still there? Hmmmmm. Now I’m the one who’s feeling violated.

Of course that could have just been a bug and not the real reason for my problems. So what the heck was going on here? I suspected a possible conflict with the stuff that I feed my system tray, but it still choked after a clean boot. I also suspected a failing Motherboard or a bad stick of Ram, but tests by CheckIt and TuffTest Pro left me feeling unsatisfied with an overpowering desire to chew (”bad stick” - um… get it?).

My next step would have been to run SpinRite overnight to nibble on my hard drive, but my floppy ‘ate’ a disk (literally) so that was out of the question.

(Ain’t computers supposed to make our lives easier, ya-da-ya-da-ya-da?)

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UPDATE:

Ok, so now that I’m completely stressed out, in my desperation I did a little Googling and discovered a recipe for disaster about the evils of Pagefile.sys and Hyberfil.sys. And so I turned them off, deleted it, defragged the hard drive and now everything seems to be cooking better than ever.

It would appear that over time these files had somehow become rancid, er.. corrupted. Now if I could only get the floppy drive to spit out my disk. Still hungry for more? Bah-dah-ba-ba-bahhhhh. I’m lovin’ it!