yeah, one of those days. I guess it really started yesterday. I was looking into the lag this computer was going through when I played stuff in winamp… seemed impossible to figure out, and then it started getting really bad, and not just when I was playing stuff in winamp. I think I had to hard reset it once. I started doing some spyware and virus scanning, and it was going so slow, I couldn’t even let it finish. That’s when I noticed that rebooting was talking a long time… or more specifically, logging in was taking forever. I’d sit there and watch the task manager and try and figure out why the CPU usage was hovering between 30 and 60% while nothing was running. Then suddenly, it would be down to nothing. And the whole machine ran fine… until I tried to use winamp again. Then it would freeze or hang.
I gave up and brought the machine home. Miraculously, it booted really fast the first time through at home… which led me to suspect some sort of overheating issue. Until I tried to load up a playlist in winamp and start playing it. Frozen… hard reset… slow booting. went through this a couple times, continued to try to find a certain process that was using all the CPU, with no luck. Then, I ran the Dell Diagnostic utilities at boot. All the tests passed, some of them were very very long and I fell asleep while one of the RAM tests was running.
Unfortunately, I had the TV on when I fell asleep, so I woke up with the most painful headache in the world. I used to fall asleep in front of the TV at my parents’ house all the time… most of my childhood, actually. I don’t know why my head simply can’t take it anymore. Sometimes I can sleep with music, if it’s really really low. This was a killer headache. I didn’t even want to go to work, but I did. I found some CVS brand acetaminophen in the car and took one with some coffee… hoping the double dose of drugs and caffeine would help and it seemed to. I’m probably not as affected by caffeine as I used to be, but I rarely take any kind of painkillers, so my tolerance is super low. By the time I got to work, the pain was sort of rolling around in the background, and then subsided entirely.
Before I left for work, I somehow managed to get the computer to a stable state, some 5-10 minutes or so after initial boot and then put it on standby instead of actually shutting it down. It worked brilliantly, and the machine came right back up and didn’t lag at all while I was at the teen center. I was smart and didn’t try playing any music while I was there… and put it on standby instead of shutting it down completely. I’m sort of afraid to ever shut it down completely, again, but I know I’ll have to someday.
My after-work plans fell through again, so I headed home. Got some taco bell on the way, figuring it’ll be the last thing I eat before the big ol’ thanksgiving feast awaiting me in Plymouth, tomorrow. I bring it and my computer up to the apartment. I put the bag on the couch and the drink on the arm of the couch and start unpacking the computer. It’s gets booted up and seems a little slow, at the get-go, but starts to speed up when I close the programs that were still open from the teen center and re-open them. At this point, Tyler is jealous that I’m paying attention to my computer and food and not him… so he jumps up on the couch, crosses over the keyboard several times, sniffs at my food, jumps down onto the floor and into the laptop case, jumps back up on the couch, steps on the keyboard and somehow manages to hit some these extra multimedia keys, subsequently opening winamp and making the computer hang. I brush him aside, he jumps back to the floor for a second. Then he jumps back up on the couch and proceeds to knock the entire 32oz soda off the arm of the couch and directly into the laptop case. We fight. It’s a knockdown dragout battle royale across the entire apartment. When I get back to the computer, I find that it really only hung for about a minute, it didn’t fully freeze/crash. This sort of furthers the hypothesis that it’s sound related. Or possibly wav/mp3 related. It definitely hung a couple times while I was trying to close down McAfee, which makes an annoying noise when you close it down, unlike all the other little taskbar applications. I still don’t really have any idea how to resolve this issue, but I’ve got some leads. I simply can’t ‘not play music‘ on my computer… it’s essential to my computing habits.
woot
sorry. I love laptop bag, you know I didn’t do it on purpose.
I thought about stuffing you in the wet laptop bag and zipping it up. But you’re too cute to stay mad at.