OK, so I’m finally starting to relax a little bit. After six weeks of intermittent crashes and daily blue-screens, I’ve now gone four days on my production Vista machine without a major hiccup. I’ve still had a few minor problems, as I’ll soon report, but it now seems somewhat safe to say that the system is reasonably stable and appears inclined to stay that way. I have one word to comment on this state of affairs: “Hooray!”
Continue reading Following the Breadcrumbs in Event Viewer
In a recent blog of mine “Hot outside, hot inside too”, I reported on the effects of a failed air conditioner on the temperatures inside my PC. Now that repairs on complete and things are back to what passes for normal around here, I thought it might be interesting to see how current temperatures compare. Incidentally and interestingly, it seems my memory of how my PC works and how it actually works are reasonably close, if not completely in agreement.
Continue reading Cool, calm, and corrected: Temps back to normal
OK, I have to start this blog with a confession: I’m an inveterate system tinkerer, and am always looking for something better for my system (if not for something rated as the best of its kind). For example, this approach has led me to skip using a good all-around security suite in favor of picking the best elements of each kind by itself (anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, anti-spam, rootkit detector, intrusion detection/prevention, system file and state monitoring, and so forth).
Continue reading Best-of-Breed Apps Aren’t Always Best for Vista
This morning, I posted the news that circumstances beyond my control–a crashed member of the mirrored disk pair that makes up the system drive on my production PC–forced me to reinstall Vista on that machine. I’m now more or less finished with that chore, though I still have many more applications to dig up and reinstall to completely rebuild the desktop environment present before the crash. That said, I probably won’t reinstall everything anyway: I’ve become a believer in keeping my production machine simpler and less cluttered up than it had been in the months leading up to the crash. That’s what test machines are for!
Continue reading Back to Work, More or Less
If you’re been following my travails with my primary production system lately, you already know that I’ve been struggling to fix mysterious hangs and occasional bluescreens since the third week of July. On Wednesday, one of the two drives in my system drive mirror crashed. I not only replaced both of those drives, I also went ahead, bit the bullet, and did a clean reinstall of Vista Ultimate on that machine. The PC kept running properly through the night for the first time since my troubles began, so I got up the next morning to find a system that still responded to my attempts to log in (previously, leaving the machine alone for more than 2-3 hours would cause the GUI to freeze, and the Explorer interface to become inaccessible).
Continue reading Another BSOD in the wall
This morning, I began my day with some modest self-congratulation, or perhaps just a small sigh of relief that my recent Vista crises have abated. It’s now been 9 days since my last bluescreen and my System Stability Index in Reliability Monitor is nearly at 8.0 for the first time since August 11. I sincerely hope I’m not jinxing myself to make this statement but it appears that my production system is finally stable. Zounds! What a wild ride it’s been.
Continue reading 98 Bottles of Beer…No, Wait! 98 Generic volume Shadow Copy Devices
A number of users have encountered and commented on a flaky “flooding” error on ViztaView.com over the last couple of weeks. They’ve also complained about issues registering for the community, long page waits, and other oddities. Today you might notice that all these troubles have disappeared. That’s because our Managing Editor (yours truly) discovered that we had installed a redundant component under Joomla!1.5, the content management system that runs this site.
Continue reading Mystery Solved: This web site!
I spent some time poking around at techsupportforum.com in their Windows Vista Support area. For those not already in the habit, let me observe that it’s amazing how much you can learn from reading through other user’s problems along with the tools and techniques that knowledgeable experts suggest to help them ease their afflictions, or at least start shooting back at what troubles them. While reading through a thread from a person suffering from driver problems, I learned about the Windows Driver Verifier, aka verifier.exe. But that’s not all I learned…
Continue reading Driver Troubleshooting Calls For Serious Tools
Thermaltake makes some terrific products for PC enthusiasts and professionals inclined to pick up tools and computer components and indulge in a little do-it-yourself activity. In another recent review, I examined their nifty eSATA/USB hard drive dock, which led them to send me an actively ventilated and much more attractive eSATA/USB drive enclosure: This device is known as the Vi-ON ST0008U 3.5 External Hard Drive Enclosure with Active SMART Cooling System, and it retails for between $44 and $50 online (list price on the Thermaltake product page is $60). For the rest of this review, I’ll simply call it the Vi-ON for brevity.
Continue reading Thermaltake Vi-ON 3.5″ External HD Enclosure
In case you don’t already know, I make my living by writing articles, white papers, books, video scripts, help files, technical documentation, and other forms of information about computer software, systems, and networks. I’ve been doing this for a long time (since 1986 part-time, and since 1994 full-time). Over the years, I’ve seen some terrible things happen to PCs when users decide to uninstall some particular piece of software, use the vendor’s uninstall utility, and then start encountering problems.
Continue reading Should Software Makers Clean Up After Themselves?