Archive: Opinions

After your health and that of your loved ones, the most horrible thing that can happen to you in this day and age is a misbehaving computer.  It sucks the energy and focus right out of you as you dig deeper and deeper into your search for whatever the heck it is that is making it drive you nuts.  You become distracted.  You don't want to leave it until it is working perfectly, but it may take days or even weeks for that to happen.  You lose sleep.  You start to loose weight from stress and worry.

That was my week.  My new computer would freeze.  I would have to force it to turn off, then turn it back on.  It would wait a little while and freeze again.  The next time it would freeze seconds after booting.  Force off, restart, force off, restart... call tech support...

When this happens to an old computer you kind of expect it.  Something you installed, perhaps, corrupts some obscure setting and you are off to the nut house trying to figure out what the heck you did.

But when it happens to a new computer it is much, much worse.  You just spent all that money for a heap of silicon and plastic that doesn't work.  Worse, it gets in the way of YOU working!  Will the company support you or will they blame you for installing something, or booting the computer with a real boot -- a good swift kick?

Or will they know the exact little thing that you have missed over and over as you struggle to get back to normal computing life?

In my case they were very supportive and helpful.  After the first call it seemed to work.  The support technician was was calm and reassuring, so i didn't hang myself with an old keyboard cord.  Afterward the computer worked better --  though it still froze up intermittently.  The keyboard and mouse would lose their ability to talk to the computer.    I hit 'Save' more times than I ever did before, never knowing when my computer would take my work away from me forever.

Almost a week later something awful happened: key programs that come with the operating system (including the file system) stopped working.  Most wouldn't load.  They'd show an error message.  I think it was from all the forced shut-downs, some settings not being saved before the power was yanked.  YIKE!

Support technician #2 talked me through reinstalling the operating system.  He was calm and reassuring, so I didn't jump out the window in despair (my office is on the ground floor in any event).  He said that he hoped this would stop the freezes, but if it didn't we'd then uninstall programs and hardware, then reinstall one at a time to see which one was causing my misery.

While it was nice to have the operating system back, that didn't solve my problem.  But I started thinking about what the support technician had said.  I took the opposite approach, scoping out what could cause my computer's symptoms and taking it away, rather than taking EVERYTHING away first.

His way makes more sense when you want to solve the problem reliably, because you start with a computer you KNOW is working and go until you find the offending program or piece of hardware.   But my way involves less heartache and lost settings, as long as it eventually works.  So I picked my way.

I narrowed it down to my email program.  It occurred to me that an email program waits X seconds or minutes, does something like reaching out to the Internet to find your mail, then pauses for a while longer.  With over a dozen email accounts and different filters and God knows what else, I reasoned that could account for the pause before the freezes.  When I transferred that program and thousands of undeleted emails from the old computer something REALLY bad must have happened.  Unfortunately I need email to make the newspaper, so this meant spending a whole day transferring all my mail and email addresses to a different email program.

Not running that old email program almost entirely stopped the freezes, though.  Except for the freezes that it didn't stop.

So I unhooked my wireless keyboard and mouse, replacing them with wired equipment.  Bingo!  No more freezes!  Today I reinstalled the wireless mouse, because I think it's cool.  So far no freezes!  That points to the keyboard.  And the corrupted email program.  With those two gone I've had two whole days without freeze-ups.  Having two things cause the problem made it complicated.  Like computers like to be.

Which meant that I had two whole days to put together this week's issue.  If it seems a little more out of breath than usual, now you know why.  But I'll bet I'll sleep better tonight than I have for over a week.  And my computer is now officially awesome!

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