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 digging further into my BSOD from Thursday, August 7, using the Windows Debugger I observed that the ultimate cause was a module named pctsSvc.exe (see attached screenshot below). A quick process lookup informs me that this is part of PC Tools Spyware Doctor runtime environment. Additional research on Windows crashes related to this module indicates that a remove/reinstall maneuver often addresses the problem (see this PC Tools forum thread for more info).
Continue reading More on the latest BSOD
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
This looked just plain weird to me. When I checked Reliability Monitor and the installation of the generic volume shadow copy devices I couldn’t make out a pattern even though it was there to be found. I even posted queries about this to vistaforums.com, techsupportforum.com, and to Microsoft Tech Support, but it took a Facebook email to one of the demiurges in the Windows pantheon–namely, Mark Russinovich–to get to the bottom of the matter (more on this to follow at the end of this story).
Continue reading Mystery Solved — 103 Devices, 5 Volumes
In the wake of installing Vista SP1, I’ve been noticing various little “gotchas” that have popped up and require my attention as time goes by. It’s been about 4 to 5 months since SP1 hit, and I’ve been slowly and steadily inspecting and cleaning up in its wake.
Continue reading Post SP1 Cleanup, Part 1
Whenever you install a service pack on a Windows machine, it’s not unusual for it to leave plenty of files strewn about your system disk in its wake. What’s unusual about Windows Vista SP1, however, is that it includes its own clean-up utility.
Continue reading Post SP1 Cleanup, Part 3