Snow Crash

This is not about the book "Snow Crash" by Neil Stephenson,
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash and http://www.amazon.com/Snow-Crash-Bantam-Spectra-Book/dp/0553380958)
a surprisingly prophetic science fiction novel that portrays a virtual world with similarities to the "World of Warcraft" online video game http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml

This about the confluence of me starting to work out of my house, the snow storm that would have kept me home anyway, and all the computer system crashes I have been dealing with.

I wrote a status report yesterday using the company's web email. Clicked something and it disappeared. Bummer, man. I think I closed the window, expecting it to ask me if I wanted to save the message in my drafts folder, which I is exactly what I wanted. But this is not Outlook running on my computer. This is some other animal, and it just dumped my carefully crafted dissertation.

I had an old e-machines PC (1.5 GHz) picked out to use for work. I had heard about a problem with random resets on this unit, but they were intermittent. More of an annoyance than a real problem. I thought a good dusting of the inside of the case and a clean install of Windows would fix it, but such is not the case.

Reseated the memory sticks (2 x 128 MB) to see if that would fix the problem, rather it killed it dead. Swapped memory sticks around and found a pair that work, same capacity.

Downloaded several cpu monitoring programs. "Speed Fan" seems to work, the others wouldn't work with this old system (2001). Download a stress test. At idle the cpu temp is reported as 30 degrees Celsius, under load it jumps up to the high 60's. After about an hour the system resets. It doesn't get flaky, or act weird. You can be working along, just typing, and bam, it's like someone pushed the reset button.

It has been a while since I set up a computer and I had forgotten how long it takes. More likely, I never kept track. This time I was expecting to spend a couple of hours and things would be up and running and I could start on my real job. Such was not the case. There are all the default programs and drivers that need to be located, downloaded and installed. Not to mention having to back up 40 GB of data. That takes a while, even disk to disk, no network involved. Probably the worst time sucker was getting sidetracked while I was waiting for something to complete. Start something going and check on it a couple of minutes later. If it is not done, it tends to be longer before I check it again, and if still not done, it will be even longer before I make the next check. So it might be a couple of hours before I realize that something that took 30 minutes to complete is done.

Meanwhile I will be using my Dells.