Because my life wasn't hard enough

[cleolinda]

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?

Comments

[lizoraveriam.livejournal.com]

My computer was doing the same shady stuff, and my dad (a computer program, so the freeware is the legit, non-virus laden stuff) sent me three links to sort it out:

Treesize Free - lets you know the size of the contents of a directory
http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml
This is most useful for just seeing where everything is and what it's doing.

cCleaner - remove unnecessary files from your computer
http://www.ccleaner.com/

Process Explorer - shows all the programs and services that are running
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx

I think this last one might be the most useful to you since if there's some creeper program messing with your computer it'll show up on here.

Hope any of those help. Computers being messed up for absolutely no discernible reason is never fun

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Oh, sweet--I'm downloading that last one for sure, because it really sounds like it could help pinpoint what the problem is. I like the idea of cCleaner, but the last time I used a program like that, it pulled off two "unnecessary" files that ended up necessitating the complete reinstallation of Microsoft Word. So I'm a little jumpy about deleting things now.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I use CCleaner personally, and have never had a problem with it.

But I'm also totally comfortable reinstalling anything I need to, at any time. So it's not exactly the same situation.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Okay, I don't know exactly what cCleaner took off--nothing on the list looked unusual; it was mostly leftover cruft from programs I've uninstalled over the last couple of years--but my computer's already running better, and I was able to get back on my own user profile. Things seem to be running better, too. The test will be if I have another crash tonight, but I guess I'll keep the computer running until I have one, just to see how long it takes. In other words: thank you, that was an awesome suggestion.

(I also ran Process Explorer, but I can't figure out how to read it quite yet.)

[lizoraveriam.livejournal.com]

I'm glad it worked :). Yeah, Process Explorer is useful but it looks like a drug trip gone wrong until you get used to it. But hey, even a little bit of improved computer is better than none :)