Because my life wasn't hard enough

Okay. We had a thunderstorm yesterday that, despite being mild by all appearances, knocked out the neighborhood's power for four hours and killed our internet until about an hour ago. In the meantime, my computer itself has been flipping out for the last week or so--it keeps crashing (once or twice a day; I've been logging off and/or shutting it down two or three times a day in an attempt to avoid this, whereas I used to leave the computer on all the time) and saying that it doesn't have "sufficient quota" to do anything, which, given that I have 38% of a 150 GB hard drive free with the RAM necessary to run it, I don't know how that's possible. It's like there's something running in the background, maybe, that's sucking up all the resources, but we don't know what it is. I thought maybe it was the wifi itself, because the day of installation was exactly the day the problems started, but the Charter people are disavowing any knowledge or possibility of such a problem. I've run virus scans and not found any. Something is slowing the computer down and eating up resources, but I can't figure out what. And it's so bad now that it won't even let me log onto the computer (not the internet, the computer) under my own user profile--it's making me use the default user profile with no desktop wallpaper, no preferences, no bells and whistles.

The Charter people are suggesting that I reformat my hard drive (sigh), and if I do that, I have a friend I'm going to get over here to do that, because that's not something I'm fooling with by myself. The computer itself suggested that I "disable BIOS shadowing and caching," which does sound like it would free up the mystical "quota," but I can't figure out how to do that, either.

So if you don't hear from me for a while--or get any linkspam--you'll know it's gotten worse.


Oh, and trailer_spot has the Twilight clip up.


ETA: Okay. Commenters are suggesting that the wifi software that the Charter guy came over and installed has caused a memory leak, which is sounding right to me, because the problems started the same day, I've never had these problems before, I didn't go anywhere weird or dangerous on the internet to pick up a virus, and I have two overlapping antivirus programs running. Here's my question: how do I stop the memory leak or debug the Charter software?

Feeling a bit better

So. lizoraveriam linked to a few helpful programs, and you know what caused the most visible improvement? CCleaner. It got rid of a bunch of cruft left behind by uninstalled programs--I don't know if that solved the problem, as it also sounded very likely that the Charter software was buggy and possibly causing a memory leak, but I haven't been able to find evidence of the wifi itself taking/using up all that much space. So basically, I'm going to leave the computer on--I used to turn it off maybe every week or two, whether it needed it or not, but let it run otherwise. (Okay, answer this debate for me: better to turn the computer off daily or leave it on? I had been told it was better to leave it on, as the shutting down and rebooting was what used it up and "aged" it, or however you want to put it. That's why I'd been leaving it on, at any rate--I've done that with all my computers over the years, and they've all kept on trucking until an actual virus brought one down.) Anyway, after the wifi software was installed, it kept crashing or saying it didn't have enough quota, etc., etc., so I'd turn it off a couple of times a day this past week to try to prevent that. So what I'm saying now is I'm gonna let the computer run on wild and free until it crashes, if it crashes, to see if the quota problem has been resolved. Because, if nothing happens the rest of the week, we're obviously back to normal. And if it does crash, I have a couple of diagnostic programs I can look at now to see what the problem might be.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my grandmother is fine. ( Read more... )

( Linkspam )