Cav's Place

Got the repaired HDD yesterday, but due to some issues which I’ll describe below I only installed and checked it today, also copying everything back on it in the process. At least this time around it doesn’t have bad sectors from the very beginning, as the old one had, but with a label that says “certified repaired” on it, I’m not putting too much faith into it lasting too long. It’s not the same one I sent them of course, the serial number is different, but seeing that it’s “repaired” when the model is so known for being faulty either way really doesn’t help one’s confidence.
Didn’t install Windows on it yet, however, because there’s something to be done around the window and I took this opportunity today to move the desk and dad prepared the area and also sprayed where mold had appeared again, in the areas where I hadn’t sprayed when I last did so myself, so the computer wasn’t on for most of the day. Getting that done, along with drivers and updates, is the plan for tomorrow, but then I’ll stop, without also installing any programs, and switch back to this one to test some things, such as making sure I remember exactly what mods I had installed for games and comparing the latest version with the one I had before for some programs, to see whether I actually want to upgrade or not.

And since I mentioned testing newer versions, I’ve been doing that for my antivirus. I was quite sure that I wanted to stick to the 2011 version, but took the opportunity to try the latest one and convinced myself that my original idea was right. It has a couple of interesting new features, but also, as I knew, changed others in ways that I really can’t deal with… And it’s still not stable, despite having been released back in June. A module didn’t make any exceptions to granting access on boot, so you couldn’t run chkdsk on the system partition, and Tuesday they released an update to finally fix that, as well as several other issues, but in the process basically made computers running it unusable unless on-access scanning was disabled.
I did notice that as soon as I rebooted after that update the computer got much slower and there were some weird HDD access patterns, but tried to just deal with it… Until I tried to open the file with my story and I got a blue screen, which obviously made me just about shit myself. A reboot in safe mode with command prompt worked, chkdsk, which then I could at least run, didn’t find anything wrong with the drive, but trying to boot normally just resulted in another blue screen, and then an attempt at a regular safe mode resulted in another automatic reboot. Back in safe mode with command prompt, I took it step by step, disabled and re-enabled the driver listed on the second blue screen, then finally managed to boot normally and do what I still had to do that night, though the system was extremely slow.
Actually left it like that when I went to bed, but woke up after barely three hours and noticed the HDD LED back to the same pattern, and by then I was quite sure I knew it was because of the antivirus, despite what the blue screen had said, so I went to their forums, saw that some people were saying that disabling on-access scanning fixes it for now and did just that. Then I waited for a patch to fix the patch, which they had announced yesterday morning, in the only forum post that actually said something about the problem and didn’t just ask everyone reporting it to run various diagnostics and send them the results, as being at most 24 hours away, so that was why I didn’t put in the new HDD as soon as I got it, wanting to improve my odds of being able to boot again. However, this morning I just said fuck it, if it’s disabled it should work well enough, and did it anyway, because the announced fix only came later, ending up being installed after I turned the computer back on in the evening.

Otherwise, I think this issue gave me the idea for the next post to file under Society, though I can’t say whether I’ll be able to actually write it this weekend or it’ll have to wait for next week, after everything will be back in its place. Still, I absolutely need another couple of posts filed under Society by the end of the year if I’m to manage to stick to that rule for as long as I said I will and not end up needing to drop it even earlier, so you might say that this helped in some way, and at least nothing got damaged in the process, or at least I didn’t notice anything get damaged, so it can be said that all’s well that ends well… Though I sure wish they’d release new versions when they’re actually stable for once, because they seem to release them earlier every year, getting from a September or perhaps even October release date back when I first started using it, in 2004, to June now, but the most nagging issues are still only fixed around November, and unfortunately the patches meant to fix said issues also quite often tend to introduce even worse bugs at first, before new patches released in a haste fix those as well. As you can see, this year was no different.

But enough about that. Now I have to catch up on what I couldn’t do today, tomorrow I have my work cut out for me, after that I’ll see how the weekend plays out and on Monday I gather the last part of the work on the window will be done, so I’ll be getting everything out and moving the desk again, and then probably once again going to check on something I got curious about this week, just like I did today while dad was spraying, considering how badly those vapors messed me up last time.

Oh, that’s a “round” post number, isn’t it? Fitting for one dealing with computer issues.