Welp, there goes my laptop…
Bad news everyone. I am going to be without my laptop for at least two weeks. On Thursday night, my laptop froze for ten minutes half way through the song Bloom by Radiohead, then again during Crystal Ball by Keane, making a god awful racket. I shut the computer down eventually and when I turned it back on, I decided to go find the cause of the problem.
Of course, searching “computer freezes randomly” in a search engine, Google or otherwise, gives too many results. Pro tip, try and narrow things down by entering your operating system and the make of your laptop, as well as some of its parts. I didn’t find anything.
Along came _aD to save the day. I have known _aD for a very long time, he is one of my oldest Steam friends and we used to play Left 4 Dead together. He has a magic book full of Windows error codes that covers about everything, we just needed to find the actual errors. Problem Viewer was our first stop, and _aD was very thankful that I knew my way round a computer. There were a few errors but only one that looked actually troublesome, so we moved on to Event Viewer.
Even then, my laptop was struggling. It was then that I decided to back up as much as possible to my external hard drive. Thankfully, all ny work and the majority of other stuff (including my Daily SPUF backups) are already on my external. There’s some duplicated stuff now, as well as 3GB worth of fonts, but I saved as much as I could.
In Event Viewer, under Custom Views and Administrative, we found the problem. Bad blocks. All over the place, starting around the horrible crashes. My hard drive, or at least the connection between my hard drive and the rest of my computer, was dying and slowly corrupting itself. There was also a warning that looked incredibky weird, involving programs stopping something from ejecting because the programs were using them. During this time there was no I/O at all, and _aD congratulated my laptop on how patient it was, as most other computers may have exploded. Metaphorically, I hope.
What with it being midnight, I backed up what I could, and this morning I took old LappyToppy (the name I gave my computer when I first got it nearly two years ago) back to the store where I got it. Why? Two year warranty, bitches.
So my laptop will be fixed for free or mostly free, but it will take two weeks, mostly waiting for the part to come in. In the mean time, things are kinda on hold. Aabicus will make sure that the Daily SPUF remains daily. The Phoviverse though will probably not receive any updates until I get my computer back, and for the next few weeks, my 500 words a day promise (this article counts for today’s 500 words) will consist mostly of Daily SPUF articles. There probably will be a bunch of Phoviverse stuff uploaded when I get my laptop back, but this is a chance to take a break from that (and get Arkay back home and work out what I am doing with Travels of Kayel and Cexit) and come back to it fresh. May write a Tea with Death in the meantime though.
Anyway, I would like to say goodbye to my old hard drive, T-bunchanumbers. Rest in peace, hard drive. Phovidrive and Beenadrive shall carry on your legacy.
Now to work out what games I can play, and see if there’s an easier way to write articles on my phone.