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PC failure
7 Mar 2010 19:57A brief note to friends, colleagues, and others who may give a doodle: The hard drive on my primary PC died on March 6. While the machine is in the shop, I'm relegated to using this very old, rather basic laptop with a bad keyboard. I lack all access to my archived e-mail, I can only correspond via gmail, and I don't even have access to a copy of Word.* I am therefore not very available online . . . or in real life, as I dicker with shops and eventually spend many days rebuilding my work environment. If it's desperately important that you get in touch, try the phone.
Thanks for your patience!
* Those of you who deal with me professionally shouldn't worry: all drafts and notes on drafts are backed up. Nothing valuable was lost except for my time.
I got Left 4 Dead late last year – let's say I've had it for about a year. During that time, I think I had one crash, and that was my fault; I left the wrong thing running in the background. Anyway, a few weeks ago, I downloaded the Left 4 Dead 2 demo. When I started it for the first time, it recommended that I update my GeForce drivers. Okay, "new game, new drivers"; that's how 3D games have always done things. This was fine until the middle of last week.
Sometime last week, Left 4 Dead crashed abruptly – we're not talking "stutter" here, or even a BSOD. The game just stopped hard and left me with a black screen; in fact, my monitor displayed its "looking for video signal/no signal" message, which it normally only shows when my PC is off or the monitor isn't plugged in. With this, I got looping sound; a sample of the last sound I heard in-game before the crash, over and over again. To resolve this crash, I had to use the power button.
When the PC came back up again, all was fine. No corruption, no problems . . . I ran diagnostics on the hardware, checked the integrity of Vista, even scanned for viruses. Nada. My system scored high on the "no issues at all" scale. Well, that's good. Maybe it was a fluke.
No such luck. Since then, both Left 4 Dead and the Left 4 Dead 2 demo have crashed repeatedly. Sometimes, it's once in a night; other times, it's five times in an hour. It's always the same crash: instant blackness and a sound loop, forcing me to cycle power. Afterward, Windows recovers as if nothing had happened.
It's fairly clear that this is linked in part to the GeForce drivers. They're the main delineator here: I crashed once – only to desktop, I should add – with the 181.xx through 186.xx drivers I had used for most of my fun times with Left 4 Dead. I've crashed lots of times, rather badly at that, with the 191.07 driver.
The obvious thing would be a driver rollback, right? Oh, if only it were so simple. I did that. It didn't solve the problem.
So I checked the Event Viewer for other possible causes. The only errors it had were all WMI errors, code 10. But when I ran diagnostics on WMI, it was fine – the repository was in good shape and all the WMI components were present and healthy. In fact, this computer has loads of code 10 errors logged, and I rather doubt that's the cause. I think it logs a code 10 whenever the system halts unexpectedly for any reason at all.
My conclusion is that some other recent change in the environment is somehow conflicting with the GeForce drivers. Windows does like its updates, and there have been a dozen or more of those between when I downloaded 191.07 and when the crashes got bad. There have also been updates for my AV software (McAfee), Java, and probably six or eight other things. This complicates the sleuthing.
Anyway, I'm ranting on the off chance that somebody who knows me has a bright idea. The relevant bits of my system are as follows:
Motherboard: ASUS P5Q-EMy sound and ethernet are on the motherboard; I don't have separate devices for those. All drivers are up to date, according to pcpitstop.com. (Of course, this might be the problem.) As for Left 4 Dead and the Left 4 Dead 2 demo, I run them at maximum detail with multicore rendering turned on, in my monitor's native resolution (1680×1050).
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad 9300
Memory: 4GB OCZ DDR2-1066 Reaper
Hard Drive: Seagate ST3500320NS
Video Card: ASUS EN9800GT Hybrid Power
Display: Samsung 2253BW
OS: MS Windows Vista Home Premium x64, SP2
Any constructive input would be appreciated. By "constructive," I mean, "Please avoid, 'Check for viruses and malware,' 'Scan for Windows integrity,' 'Verify hardware function,' and, 'Try a driver rollback.'" I've done all that twice, and no joy. It's clearly something a little more subtle, like a specific security update for Vista SP2 and the 191.07 driver fighting over some bit of paged pool memory.
And please, no "Get a Mac!" or "Use Linux!" Vista is working like a champ for everything else. I lay this one squarely at the feet of nVidia.
Cooler Master bad,
That's based entirely on info about the capacitors. Maybe other considerations matter more than explosions to some.
That's all!
Anyway, my new PC has Word 2007. Which is awesome, incidentally. It's many times faster and more stable than Word 2000 or 2003 ever was, and personally, I like the interface. There's just one hitch: It cannot save in Word 6.0/95 format. I don't mean that it's less-than-perfect or requires an add-in -- I mean, you can't do it.
Well, not quite. Apparently, if you've got the volume-licensed Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 and install a special admin tool, you can, via the Office Configuration Tool, enable a "Save As" option that outputs Word 6.0/95. So it's possible in the sense that the converter is lurking in there somewhere, just not in the sense that plebes like me, with lowlier editions (see here), can use it. Argh.
So now I have to figure out how to fix this headache, which of course Microsoft doesn't want me to do. Argh!
Not-so-green Apple
24 Oct 2008 01:22
We had to order a replacement wall current-to-USB charger for our iPhone 3G because the old one was shockingly dangerous -- or so they say. Anyway, we're talking about an item the size of a large bullion cube with prongs. Being familiar with Apple's very compact packaging (our Shuffle shipped in a tiny box indeed), we were on the lookout for a very small parcel.Yet when the thing arrived, it was in a rather large box. Heck, a case . . . you could ship a handgun in this thing. That's Bonnie's hand in the image to the right. The little white cube is the charger. I think you can appreciate how silly it looked, sitting there on the foam like the crown jewels. You could in fact pack 48 of these gizmos in there, with room to spare for the packing material.
The moral of the story is that Apple might be one of those Left Coast companies that cultivates a hip, hippy image, but they're not exactly with the program when it comes to "green" packaging. I'm almost tempted to order a screw or something just to see how it comes packed!
And yeah, I totally realize that this is a trivial thing to write about. It's just that overpackaging is a bugbear of mine. I'm still not over wasting an hour getting my new mouse to work because it was so well-packaged that there was packing material down in the battery well. Or maybe it was some hard-to-get Pocky that drove me mad. I'm not sure which.
Wins this time:
- Fastest switchover ever, despite the "meh" items below! Rah!
- Core 2 Quad with 4GB of 1,066MHz RAM. Dang, this is fast.
- Samsung 22" monitor. This was surely the right choice. I can feel my eyestrain melting away already. And perversely, it fits where the old 19" monitor went, because new LCD monitors are more svelte and aren't 30% frame.
- Logitech G7 mouse. Wow, but this is cool. I can change dpi on the fly with buttons, and I can swap battery packs like one of those quick-shooting champs swaps pistol magazines.
- Microsoft Office 2007. Okay, so while Microsoft isn't perfect, this software is still far faster, cleaner, and better-looking than what I had on my old box. I'll have to spend a few weeks getting Word to work the right way, but that's life.
- Windows Vista x64. Specifically, it's very fast, saw my LAN right away, and supports all of my new hardware. And again, while Microsoft isn't perfect, it came through for me: My ancient mail client and text editor, which I can't bear to part with, and which are probably 16-bit applications from the Dark Ages, run better than they ever did. (And eat just about none of my RAM . . . woohoo!)
- Windows Easy Transfer. It isn't easy and it doesn't transfer. After dropping $60 on an Easy Transfer Cable, I ended up doing most of the transfer by USB key and the rest by bouncing my data off my old computer and onto my new one via my LAN.
- Stupid bit of plastic. A tiny shred of wrapper down inside the battery well of the mouse prevented the battery from making contact. It took an hour to troubleshoot this (I mean, I don't own a fiberscope). It wouldn't have been there if the mouse hadn't been inside a bag inside a clamshell case inside a box. Overpackaging sucks . . .
- Headset mic. This has nothing to do with the new PC, I think. But the mic on my relatively new headset doesn't work (at least not well), meaning that the Shiny New™ experience is slightly tarnished by a cranky piece of old kit.
BEM, MIB . . . or WLAN?
9 Oct 2008 11:16Has anybody ever heard of an 802.11g access point causing audible artifacts on random speakers around the house? I swear, it's freaky.
And if it isn't that . . .
