cleolinda | 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?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

If you want to confirm it, the Process Manager (ctrl-alt-del) usually will tell you how much memory something is using. If your Charter wifi program is using anywhere above 30 MB (which will read something like 30,720 KB), there's something wrong unless it uses a shitload of images... and even then. And if it never drops below the number it's currently at, you've got a memory leak.

It says Firefox is using 80mb+ (and all I've got open is this and email)--could that be the wifi?

That's just Firefox being Firefox...

Ah. Well, there's nothing else running that's even as high as 30 mb...

What version of FFox are you running? My laptop would exhibit the same behavior, FF would all of a sudden have a ginormous amount of memory and I'd have to kill it. When did you last update?

Hmm... recently? Whenever the latest update came out?

Because my life wasn't hard enough

Memory leak?

Re: Memory leak?

Re: Memory leak?

Re: Memory leak?

Re: Memory leak?

Re: Memory leak?