Recently, computers have been annoying me. OK, more than usual. My home machine (PC running XP) had been crashing on an increasingly frequent basis; fairly terminal hangs as well, no blue screen, the system would simply freeze. Worryingly it would occasionally do this before Windows even started, just after verifying the DMI data, which would indicate that there was an issue with the hardware rather than just the normal Windows crappery. Hardware issues are often either the RAM, the hard drive, or the power supply unit. I found a nice little app to test the RAM called memtest, and ran that for several passes: nothing. Defragged the hard disc, ran check disc: again, nada. Contemplated the futility of life, backed up the contents of the hard disc, formatted it and reinstalled XP. Everything is now back and working fine, but for one very important problem: I’d backed up my Half Life 2 game using Steam’s “Back up game files” options. Despite the name, this option doesn’t actually back up your saved games, it makes a DVD’s worth of data that will reinstall Half Life 2. I was nearly at the end of the game, and now I’ve slid down the snake back to the start. Great. Still, the computer hasn’t crashed for more than a week now so there is a silver lining, however I have yet to install the meeeeellion different programs I normally have on there, so this smooth operation may well be a transient feature.
I was also having trouble with a machine I was sorting out for my mum. Calling my mum clueless about computers would be generous, so I wanted to give her a machine that could look after itself, i.e. Win XP SP2 and AVG antivirus, both set to auto-update. The machine had previously been running Win ’98, and though I’d heard about people having issues when upgrading to XP SP2, I’d not seen any problems myself. I have now. The install went smoothly, but the onboard sound didn’t work. The machine has a Giga-byte motherboard with onboard Realtek AC97 sound, but Windows insisted on identifying it as a C-Media chip and installing drivers for that. Funnily enough, they didn’t work. Uninstalling them and trying to install the Realtek drivers caused the machine to reset itself. Hunting around on the web, I eventually found this solution. Did the registery hacking, got Windows to stop desperately trying to use C-Media drivers, tried installing the Realtek drivers…
Black screen, machine resets. Said bollocks to it, nipped out and bought a Soundblaster live, installed that and hey presto, working sound. Which just goes to show, if you’ve got a problem, throw money at it until it goes away. If you run out of problems before you run out of money, you’ve won. If not… you lose.