I have a sneaking suspicion the desktop computer is about to bite the big one. For the past three weeks it’s been taking a minimum of two or, on occasion, a maximum of four goes to get him to a workable state.
The most common ‘fault’ is after he fires up, my coffee’s ready and I sit and move the cursor, he done go and freeze and absolutely nothing does anything. I can hit random keys, cursor keys or run up and down the F keys – nothing. What I have cottoned on to is those ‘F’ keys and I’m now sure the term ‘function’ is a cover for the real name for these most frustrating of keys. No, it’s not ‘frustrate’. It’s a word that must be uttered by a million plus Windows users hourly as they jab with increasing frustration at those ‘F’ing keys.
Anyhoo, all I can do is kill the power and restart. This works but on an increasing number of occasions, moments later, I’m presented with one of a selection of Bill’s Screens of Death. The messages vary and some times I just get the one and a restart – sometimes one after the other. However many I get he eventually settles down and off we go.
As a by-the-by, and further to the ‘progress bar’ percentage moan the other day, I did one of they command line disk repair thingies. This involves typing a command at the command prompt as an administrator and restarting the beast. On restart he whisks along the repair up to 11% and that is it. What to do? kill the power and restart. After restart number three, it became obvious he was in a loop with no escape.
What the hay, leave it alone and see what happens. This I did and later discovered this; if you ever do that repair thingy, it’ll stick on 10 or 11% for an awful long time then suddenly gallop along to complete. It took my machine three hours of which two hours and fifty-eight minutes showed 11% complete. Thanks for the heads-up Bill.
Did it work? I hope this answer isn’t too technical for you. No.
In the great scheme of things it’s not a big deal; just annoying and I don’t like to be beaten, especially by the richest man in the whole wide world, so I’ll keep going at it as I still have a few tricks to try one of which, I must admit, involves a four pound lump hammer...
Quote; ???
“Why are so many viruses aimed at windows? It crashes just fine on its own.”
“The problem with troubleshooting is that trouble shoots back.”
”Never let a computer know you're in a hurry.”
3 comments:
Similar symptoms on my son in law's laptop a while ago. It turned out to be a faulty RAM module. I replaced both (they have to be a matching pair) from here:
https://www.mrmemory.co.uk/
Its not likely to be the hard disk, since the operating system automatically marks bad blocks for disuse. Hard disks have a high level of redundancy and can cope easily with bad blocks. A fault elsewhere in the hard disk would most likely prevent the machine from booting at all.
A utility such as HWinfo will identify all hardware - memory module type and size, processor and all connected peripherals. Get it from:
www.hwinfo.com
I run the portable version.
Old but good...
At a recent COMDEX, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five dollar cars that got 1,000 miles per gallon."
Recently General Motors addressed this comment by releasing the statement: "Yes, but would you want your car to crash ten times a day?"
Ripper,
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Hwinfo now on a stick and ready to run tomorrow AM.
I did a couple of things when I shut down yesterday and he done fire-up this morning absolutely normally. Of course what I should’ve done is do just one thing at a time.
However, one boot-up does not a stable system make and I’ll post in a few days with any results that may have worked - or not -. Worked - or not - for me, that is.
Thanks again, and yes, I have seen the quotes before and love the GM response.
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