Cav's Place

I did say you’ll get two personal rants this week, didn’t I? Sticking to one personal and one non-personal post per week recently did preserve the “space” I still had for such rants anyway, so I’ll make some use of it now and hope I’ll get out of this mood long enough to make up for it later. But getting out of it now has to do with certain computer issues solving themselves as well, because I’ll be taking it really badly if this proves to be a hardware problem after all.

The issue first appeared, this time around, on July 5. It then happened again on July 12, August 1, August 5, August 29, August 31 and September 2. As you can see, there are some patterns, but they keep worsening. At first the problems came in pairs, but the first one was seven days apart and the second was only four days apart. Then I had, so far, three within about four days and a half. Yesterday’s freeze was the first that happened during the day, all the rest being at night, the first four actually almost at the same time, around 1:30 AM. It was also the first that didn’t start with a crash of Internet Explorer, though you can say it was still related, as it happened when I was creating a new folder directly in the Favorites one in order to quickly organize some things.
If I keep poking around after it gets to that point, it’ll really freeze. I’ll still be able to move my mouse around, but nothing else. If, however, I catch it quickly enough and try to reboot without trying to open or close more than one or two other programs first, it will eventually manage to log off, but not get past the “shutting down” message, so it won’t actually reboot normally, obviously because by that point some programs can’t even be closed by force anymore, for some reason. The only way to fix it is to press the reset button, which seems to cause some settings of the programs that are open at that time to be lost. Specifically, what I have noticed vanishing are Internet Explorer cookies that aren’t permanent, the current Winamp playlist, a few things from BitDefender, namely the fact that the current network profile is generic and the date and time of the last scan and update, the progress on the current BOINC work units and all OpenOffice settings if it also happened to be running at the time.

Now this is hardly something new, but the symptoms are somewhat different this time around. The usual issue, which I started experiencing ever since I bought this computer, had to do with the system slowing down a lot and, if I didn’t catch it in time to solve that problem, eventually freeze in pretty much the same way. However, the last time that happened, which I believe was last December, I somehow managed to reboot normally, though I had to wait a good 20 minutes for that to happen and it was probably the only time I managed that. Now I even waited for one hour and it still wouldn’t reboot normally, but the bigger problem is that I don’t seem to be given a warning or anything to do to prevent it from getting to that point. Or, perhaps, I’m given a different warning and I’m yet to learn what it is and what to do when it happens, which was also the case with this issue early on, meaning that it happened very frequently until I learned what to do about it.
I can’t consider Internet Explorer crashing to be a warning, because there doesn’t seem to be anything to do after that happens, so it’s most likely an effect instead of a cause. Makes sense, after all, since it’s open most of the time and a browser needs to almost constantly write to the system partition, so whenever that becomes impossible, which is my current working hypothesis, this may well be the first thing the user will notice. Granted that I can’t exactly know whether that really is the problem or not, nor whether it has to do only with the system partition or with all of them, but it seems plausible enough for now. Of course, that in itself is also an effect of something else, so what I need to figure out is what that is and how to fix it.

In the past, I tended to consider that there was enough circumstantial evidence pointing to the fact that BitDefender was at fault for at least most of these issues, particularly when they happened around this time of year. That’s because the current version seems to suddenly develop strange bugs around the time the public beta for the next one is released, which is around the time I started experiencing these problems now as well. The only way to fix those problems seems to be to upgrade to the new version, which I usually do as soon as it goes out of beta, but that will then have strange problems of its own for another couple of months, until they finally sort everything out… Until around the same time next year, of course. Which makes it easy to assume it to be the cause from the very beginning. It certainly seems likely, since the way I understand it is that BitDefender creates a sort of virtual file server from which the operating system then requests files, so they could all be scanned if needed. If that system becomes unresponsive or, in case of the system partition, ends up conflicting with the operating system’s security protocols, this is exactly what you’d expect to happen.
Still, being a likely cause doesn’t mean it’s the real one as well, because there are several other possibilities to consider, the most worrying of which being another imminent HDD failure. No strange noises, no blue screens, no missing files that I’m aware of, no significantly increased loading times, so no other symptoms of a HDD failure, but it would hardly be unexpected. In fact, it’d be about time, since I had one in 2007, in November, and another in 2009, in October, so this September would seem to follow. The first was a different model, but this one also seems known for low reliability, despite supposedly being part of a very reliable series, so I have reasons to worry. They had to replace it twice in 2009 because the first replacement they sent me wouldn’t work at all, and then this second one had a few bad sectors from the start. In fact, the number of reported bad sectors jumped from the six that had been there all along to 17 some months ago, though the next scan reduced that to 11, so something unpleasant is going on…
But there’s another possibility as well, and it may even be the most likely one, though I just realized it now. The first time it happened was shortly after I put in the new DVD drive, which required removing some things and putting them back in, as well as pulling quite a lot on the power cables, because something was stuck. Something may have happened then, so I guess I’ll need to open it up again and see if disconnecting and reconnecting everything one more time will do any good. Should also try once again to untie the power cables so they won’t be so twisted around anymore, but I doubt that’ll work. I’m just really worried that I may have somehow messed something up that won’t be quite so easy to fix.

I’m now trying to be very careful and avoid doing things that may cause it to freeze again as much as possible, but also look for potential warning signs in case it will happen again anyway, so I’ll finally be able to figure out exactly what’s going on. I also moved the few files that were just on my desktop to another partition, replacing them with shortcuts, and added both those files and the Risen saves, which are annoyingly placed on the system partition, to the list of files that are automatically backed up to yet another partition every morning. The last time I backed up everything important to the flash drive was last week, but that’s been causing issues as well. Actually, it behaved nicely for the past few months, but last week it again took three tries before the system recognized it.
Next week I really mean to open it up and see if there’s anything to do inside the case, and also put the old HDD in to once again copy everything to it, which I last did two months ago. It should make for a decent safety net in case something is really wrong and it’ll eventually fail, but I sure hope it won’t get there! The HDD is under warranty, but it’d be quite a bother to send it to be replaced yet again, though it’d be somewhat less bad than finding out that I caused some sort of problem that I won’t be able to fix without replacing something…