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[personal profile] 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 [livejournal.com profile] 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?

Date: 2008-06-02 10:18 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com
A memory leak can be compared to the buildup of clutter in any occupied living or working space. Programs are supposed to clean up their own mess, but sometimes they don't, and the piles get bigger and bigger...

Date: 2008-06-02 11:40 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] cleolinda.livejournal.com
You know, it's interesting you should put it that way--after I used cCleaner and got rid of a bunch of clutter left behind by uninstalled programs, I immediately saw an improvement. I was thinking of it more like a zombie program running in the background, but if it turns out that's all I needed to do, I'll take it.

Date: 2008-06-03 01:51 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] discogravy.livejournal.com
cruft left behind by poorly written programs wouldn't affect your use of RAM (a zombie program eating up memory would though). ill-programmed..uh..programs that left behind cruft might make your disks read/write slower (since they'd have to hop around to empty disk space since the cruft is taking up a lot of other disk space it perhaps shouldn't. Consider running a disk defragmentation now that you've gotten rid of old stuff that was taking up room for no reason. (although disk defrags are not really very necessary on most current systems, once in a long while is still a good idea).

To debug the charter software (ie, conclusively prove that's the problem or not) the easy way: disable it or remove it. If the problem goes away, reinstall/re-enable. If the problem comes back, you've got hard proof and can call them up.

Date: 2008-06-05 04:54 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] foresthouse.livejournal.com
Ah, I see. My computer's been slow recently, too. I may try this cCleaner thing...

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