Wheeeeeeeeeeeee

[azurelunatic]

My baby booted. My baby booted, and I have not started any non-essential programs, and I have the new bigass external drive plugged in and running a full backup of the entire unsorted hard drive, copy first apologize later.

After this backup has been sucked off him, then we can worry about things like troubleshooting and figuring out where the other 622 gigs of hard drive space got hidden and suchlike. And it's not like the most important things were not already backed up. But there's a difference between a scattershot piecemeal backup and a proper one, and oh goodness I am failtech for not having had it fully backed up like it should be from the start and no excuses.

JD came with me to Fry's (Electronics); I got started later than I'd really planned on. We located canned air and dithered over drives; I got the identical drive that JD had; it's served him well for some time. (samurai_ko had a simply horrid experience with one of the same brand, and I found horror stories about a bunch of failures, but the horror stories were firmware-related in a different model, even though they were scarily bricked.) (Related to the chatter on the drive there: when did I become old enough to start serving as an Internet Grown-Up in chatrooms? How did I start to help raise internet children? Wasn't it just yesterday that I was an internet child between the loving pizzas of the List?) (It is now a rite of passage, I suppose -- come onto the internet, start exploring, and hope like hell that the internet culture that you find will be healthy and capable of raising well-adjusted children and will embrace you. Except you don't know that to hope. You don't know what you're looking for until you've suddenly found it and found you've come home.)

There was Checkout Funtimes Theatre, and we headed back for home. I heeded my aunt's advice about 280 vs. 101 at scary times of day, and while I was waiting for JD, I worked out how to activate the alternate route: avoid this part of the route feature. So I asked to avoid 101, got 280, and it was nearly clear sailing except for some apple to mint to grape jelly with a touch of raspberry jam (see: Traffic Conditions As Rated By Actual Jams Conceit) until we hit Colma (a good place to be alive! where all the dead people are!). JD switched Riddle's route guidance off and directed me to a blue and spiky train station. I went home, by way of Trader Joe's (hummus on crisps and blueberries seem to be the food choices of the week).

I deployed my canned air to good use. Madman needed a proper dusting out. I cackled with glee as I used my real potholder mitten to hold the bottle of canned air. No possibly-frostbitten fingers for me! (Geek householding tip: hold in the potholdered hand, work the trigger with a bare hand. They make protective gloves for the express purpose of extreme-temperature household items! It's great!)

It had been fun getting the computer's side panel off. I have a shiny transparent blue acrylic case. It looks badass. It sticks like hell when you try to pry the side off, and there's nothing to grab. Next time I'm breaking out the 2.75mm crochet hook and sticking that through the non-screw hole to pull.

Not all the fans spun right when I blew them. (Madman has four case fans: one front, one rear, two side, in addition to the heat sink fans for the CPU and video card and the fan in the power supply unit.) The fan at the back did not cooperate. Closer inspection showed it was cracked. (It is made of plastic, mostly.) I took the fan apart and got to see some of the inner workings of a brushless sleeve bearing fan.

I decided to put him back together, given that for the first little while he was in service before his last dusting I don't believe the two side fans were even plugged in. And at this point I came to another small problem: plugging in the fans.

Seems somehow the metal bits of the male and female plugs to plug in said fans had gotten whacked out of alignment in some fashion in the process of my unplugging to pull off the side. Argh! I tried some finger prodding and pulling, but there was nothing for it but that I had to pull out the trusty 2.75mm crochet hook and use that as a pointy hard bit to shove the assorted bits of metal back into place. (It was not even 1mm off true, but that is enough to screw things up with those stupid plugs.) Then I couldn't get the side back on because the top was sagging just enough to not let the side snap home under it, which meant unscrewing the top enough so it would lift.

I untangled the plugs while I was at it.

Madman did boot right up and did not argue with me (last known good settings), and I plugged the external drive in with some alacrity, and got it started pulling a full backup. (It's on the C part of the music collection right now: Celtic Confusion, the track that has "Calico and Velvet"; my music collection is mostly duplicated in my folders upon folders of CDs, but it's a bear to re-rip.)

So now I wait. And, I am to hope, sleep.

Comments

[siliconshaman]

I agree with you, that behaviour is more diagnostic of a lack of systems resources. Which, if you assume you're not running something massive, probably means either a bad malware infection or a bad memory stick restricting the resources.. or if it's a multicore machine is possible one of the cores has died, which would cause a similar effect.

[azurelunatic]

I think that Google Desktop, iTunes (with a large library), Chrome with a massively sucking page (because the page routinely freezes Firefox, and in Chrome I can hope it'll only freeze the tab, and in any case Chrome isn't my primary browser), Firefox with a massive ton of tabs, and (previously) Skype (before I stopped it from autolaunching) and also Trillian, in quick succession, is enough to unnerve even a healthy computer. So I try not to do it. Sometimes I forget. Occasions when I forget are often followed by system suck.

I'm using AVG and SpyBot, and they haven't found anything untoward besides your standard tracking cookies.

He is a multicore machine, and I may take him somewhere to get all his bits and bobs checked out for my general peace of mind.

And now the I know that he sees the whole 750g during startup, but not after loading windows, I'm starting to suspect that I did something Excessively Clever when partitioning, and then didn't finish making the other partition, or else Something Weird Happened.

[siliconshaman]

*winces*

yes.. that would rather load the system somewhat.

Sounds liek you've pretty much got the bases covered. I would recommend using malwarebytes anti-malware... as always, it's freeware, but it is significantly better at rooting out crap than either of those. Personally, I still use both AVG and spybot for most things, and for daily protection. [at least on my family's windows boxes anyway]. Don't run anything else much at the same time, it plays nice with other programs, but it'll run as slow as treacle on pluto if you do!

I'd also advise looking around for some freeware systems monitoring programs. With the popularity of overclocking, there's some pretty good ones out there, making use of the machines own internal sensors.

As for the partition problem...that could be windows doing a sneaky hidden partition which it will do when upgrading some bits..and screwing up somewhere. I would recommend a full back up and reformat..just make sure you've got your systems disc and licence key [yes, that is the voice of painful experience!]

Failing that.. have you thought about going to linux?

[azurelunatic]

I have a little monitor sitting in the Google Desktop sidebar (and it's one of the things that tells me when I need to restart Firefox, because Firefox is pretty much the worst thing I run on a regular basis, and I'm saying that as someone who typically has at least two windows open with multiple tabs in each). Oddly, it never shows anything too out of line even when the system is sucking badly; I'm wondering if that's also because the system is sucking too badly for the monitor to update itself.

Systems disc and license key, heh.

I've entertained the thought of going to Linux every now and then, and I was disappointed when the shop I went to didn't have a Linux Eee in stock, but I'm not yet comfortable enough in Linux to have it running on my primary box. And of course I should get over that and just jump in, but...

[siliconshaman]

ok...my inner support tech is now banging his head against the mental construct of a desk at that.

I suspect at this point, creating a live boot disc from an .iso download is probably going to be your only hope of a reboot.... and may the Gods have mercy on your soul if you try it with a cracked version of windows!

I think a linux distro is going to be your only hope if windows goes fubar, realistically spekaing. [i.e Btdt]

As for the system monitor...yes, your system suckage would stop it from updating as well...

[azurelunatic]

And generally all the CDs that have important product keys for them, I have carefully taken a Sharpie and written that key in clear characters on the label side of that disc. So if I could find the discs, I'd automatically find all the vital information that goes with them.

*sigh*

But even if everything goes FUBAR, at this point I have about 60% of all my files on the external, I have only one program that I'd be worried about the files for on another OS (I don't know if WordPerfect comes in Linux, and I have files from the 90s in WordPerfect), I don't have any music that's tied to iTunes (though I do have my playlists and music ratings in iTunes, and that would be a beast to reconstruct). I use the GIMP anyway for images, though I'm awfully attached to Paint for quick and dirty stuff.

[siliconshaman]

Hmm.. I think open office will handle word perfect files, or abiword will I do know. There's a linux version of Paint called inkscape for Ubuntu as well...never used either myself though so I can't say what it's like though.