Fucking Computers

Long-time readers of this blog may recall that I have computer problems every few years. My normal response is to simply replace the computer. Frequently, the computer is well out of date by this point, so it's virtually a necessity anyway. This time, that option is unavailable to me.

Over the last few days, I've found my... what, 2-year-old desktop..? has been playing up. I've got it set up so there are two Admin logins (2nd being for emergency backup purposes) for installation of software and then me as a user with no admin rights. My own login has been desperately slow. For no obvious reason, Photoshop suddenly couldn't play a 12-frame GIF animation with a 0.06 second frame delay. It managed about a frame a second, with occasional bursts where it might get through 2 whole frames in a second. I didn't dare try a movie. I could start up a web browser, but navigating from page to page, or opening new tabs reduced everything to a crawl. Frequently, it would report that a page had 'become unresponsive'. Switching to email was a chore. Then things started to get really weird.

I mean, I accept that computers - particularly PCs - will slow down over time and through use. Startup is never as fast on a 2-year-old machine as it was when it was brand new. Programs are installed, the startup sequence gets added to. That kind of thing is inevitable.

But when a machine takes a couple of minutes to start up one day, then about 25 minutes the next, and can't run any fucking software, and then takes several minutes to close windows, let alone programs, there's something very seriously adrift.

And when it reports, in the bottom, righthand side of the screen that "this version of Windows is not genuine", it's starting to look like some kind of malware must be at work.

So, after sleeping very poorly last night after a day of utter frustration which left me near tears, I figured the situation left me with two choices:

1. Start the machine up as Admin, run a full virus check, run the registry checker, and run system restore to bomb it back a few weeks.
2. Give up and take it back to the shop, for the first time ever in my life actually taking damned advantage of the damned service contract.

And surely you know I'm too pig-headed for the second option.

So now I'm working on a machine which, at first glance, is up and running normally again. The system restore was simple enough, the registry checker picked up nothing out of the ordinary (3 errors have been present since I first started the machine, and are never fixed) and the virus checker reported nothing... having taken 9 hours, 1 minute and 1 second to check the machine.

That's significantly better than the 3+ days it estimated for most of the duration of the check.

As an aside, I also cleared out some of my 'Temporary Files'... It frustrates me no end that Windows is capable of hanging on to over half a gigabyte of 'Temporary Files' - some of them executables, by the looks of it - because it's supposed to remove them when it's finished. That's why they're called 'Temporary'.

It's been an awfully stressful day, and I've kept myself distracted - as far as possible - by reading the second Millennium book, The Girl Who Played with Fire. I was just over halfway through yesterday... and now I've almost finished what has been one of the most exciting books I've read this year (OK, it's still January, so that's not difficult). Even without the need for distraction, I might have found it difficult to put down. It's not quite as exciting (or as twisty) as The Delicate Dependency, which I finished shortly before I finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but I've been very impressed with almost every aspect.

The extent of Larsson's product placement is disturbing, but I guess that could just be the result of a writer who was fastidious about his details...