Cav's Place

No, the three things mentioned in the title don’t exactly have anything to do with each other. They’re simply what this post will be about, being the things that have been on my mind for the past couple of days… Actually, some of the things that have been on my mind for the past couple of days, but I won’t be writing about the rest now. A couple of those deserve posts of their own anyway, so maybe I’ll get around to it at some point in the near future.

To start with the first issue, my computer’s been causing trouble again. The problems seemed gone for a while, as there had been no more of those freezes for a good two months, but then it happened again and kept getting worse. I ended up experiencing those problems several times over the past month, culminating with having it happen twice yesterday. The last of the two was also way worse than before, probably because I had recently managed to reboot normally once, after something like this happened, and tried to repeat what I did that time but ended up getting errors, making my system become almost completely unresponsive and obviously making it worse. This seemed to result in some corrupt settings which couldn’t even be changed back and quite a mess with BitDefender.
Now it’s quite obvious that BitDefender is the cause of these freezes, which tends to be a rule towards the end of a version’s active lifespan, starting around the time the beta for the next version becomes available. In previous years they only lasted until the new version was released, because I upgraded immediately and these problems vanished, though they tended to be replaced by others, everything finally getting smoothed out only around the end of the year. However, I really don’t like the fact that they took the control away from the user even more in the latest version, not to mention that their “next generation” project would give the user next to no control at all, so this time I didn’t upgrade and was obviously left with these issues.
On the other hand, while it’s obviously the key, it’s equally obvious that it’s not just BitDefender that causes it all to happen, as another clear requirement is having a browser open at the time. Whether that has to be Internet Explorer specifically or it could be any other browser it interacts with, I don’t know, though I do know that it uses some Internet Explorer components regardless of what your default browser is. On top of that, a number of other factors, which I was never able to fully identify, also contribute to it, as the likelihood of such freezes drastically increases when I’m experiencing connection problems, when Flash objects are loading, as well as when I open or close a browser tab just when BitDefender is checking for or installing an update. A combination of at least most of these elements seems to usually be required to cause the problem, though probably not quite always.

Either way, I absolutely had to do something about it. I first tried to repair BitDefender, but that only resulted in a bunch of errors, so I had to take the longer but clearly better route. After solving the issue with the Internet Explorer settings under safe mode, I downloaded and installed the latest version of CCleaner, ran the latest version of the BitDefender Uninstall Tool under safe mode, and then ran CCleaner to clean up the remaining registry entries, as well as a few other things it noticed. Afterwards, I reinstalled BitDefender, went through the settings again, updated, rebooted, updated again and rebooted again.
Whether that actually solved the problem or just bought me some more time, I don’t know yet, but at least everything seems fine for the moment and my computer actually seems a tiny bit faster than before. If the issues were caused by some faulty update or simply by the number of updates, for BitDefender as well as for the programs it interacts with, that had piled up and had somehow accumulated very tiny issues in the process, resulting in a sort of death by a thousand cuts, they should be solved. If not and it’s an actual issue with this version of BitDefender, it’ll happen again and I doubt I’ll be able to get rid of it, seeing as they won’t be updating it anymore now that a new version is out. And I still have a paid license valid for close to two years, which makes it even more unpleasant.

One thing that I was worried about when I noticed that corruption was that I never included the Tropico 3 user data among what is automatically backed up every morning and I recently started playing through the Absolute Power campaign, completing six of its ten missions over the past few days. Of course, that’s only a problem due to this trend that I keep noticing in recent years, games saving things into the user folder instead of their own folder. It’s infuriating and likely to cause all sorts of problems, but they seem to be doing it more and more.
Thankfully, nothing seems wrong with that, so I won’t have to go through those scenarios again and I’m actually likely to finish another game this year. I’ll be writing a review once that happens, and then probably look into Tropico 4 as well. Not right away, especially since I see it’s mostly an enhanced remake of Tropico 3, but maybe a year or so from now it’ll be a good idea to play it. There should probably be an expansion by then as well.

And for the end of this post I’ll move away from computers and on to music. Yes, Nightwish finally released their seventh album, Imaginaerum. I have listened to it start to end several times already and all I’m going to say right now is that it’s likely their best yet in every way except the obvious one, namely the female vocals. But I’ll do something I never did before and write a song-by-song review of it, likely by the end of the week, so I’ll leave any other opinions for that and just get back to listening to it now.