Sporadic (spastic?) update number one: Computer Issues

[tcepsa]

quiet_ness, I feel your pain. My computer has crashed on me five or six times in the span of this evening. That's one of the reasons that these entries are going to be so short :p (Oh great and wise LiveJournal, bless me with your autosaving powers!)

Fortunately I recently got networking up and running on the distribution of Ubuntu Linux that I also happen to have installed on this computer, and it seems like it is much more stable. Hopefully no more with the unwanted crashes this evening...

My computer has never been quite right. The processer and the motherboard... don't get along all that well together. It's an Athlon XP 3000+ and I was almost certain that I had it running as such at one point, but I've had a plethora of troubles with it, and when it was plaguing me one of the key symptoms was that Memtest86 would always crash with memory errors. Currently I have it disguised as an XP 2800+ and it seems to be working all right, but I ran Memtest86 to check whether it might once again be a processer/motherboard issue. However, that does not seem to be the case; it successfully completed a full pass, whereas when it was having processer/motherboard problems it would usually die on the fourth or fifth test of the initial pass.

So I've tentatively ruled out processer/motherboard conflicts.

And now I'm running in Linux and seem to be having no major issues, but we'll see whether that holds (currently I've been up for 12 minutes--not exactly a record, even for this evening ;) But if this continues to be stable, I'm totally blaming Windows. Which means I've either got a virus or some of the software that's trying to run is not liking some of the hardware that it's trying to run on, or vice-versa. Unfortunately, I've been unable to keep it up long enough to complete a virus scan :p (but in fairness I have always been attempting to multitask while the virus scan was running, so I haven't really given it a fair shake yet). If I'm not able to run a full virus-scan, though, I start uninstalling programs.

This is all complicated by the fact that I think this new SMC wireless card had something to do with it, because when I installed it is about the same time that my system started getting all flakey. Small bit of irony: I bought it because SMC cards are supposedly better to use with Linux and I had gotten the impression that my other wireless module wouldn't. Not this one, apparently; Linux couldn't even see it. And Windows generally took several minutes to get it up and running (and when you're trying to check LJ, that's a long freaking time!!! ;) So I've removed that card and tried to re-install the D-Link USB wireless module that I had originally been using (another small bit of irony: that's what I am now using in Linux) but Windows also apparently has issues with that--complicated, of course, by the fact that it keeps crashing.

So. Virus Scan. Then probably Hard Drive scan. Then sequential removal of unnecessary software. Until the problem goes away, or I just completely reinstall Windows.

Comments

[quiet-ness.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean for it to be a contagious thing! Whoops...

Sorry to hear you're having trouble. :( Bestest wishes on the fixing.

Oddly enough, many of my problems started with the D-Link USB WiFi module, but removing it (yes, and the driver, etc.) didn't make any difference. Seems to be an amalgamation of stuff and possibly age that have just made the thing go kaplooey.