T w e n t y S i d e d
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It was the strangest thing. My computer would just lock up. Now, locking up isn’t an exotic problem by any stretch, but I’ve never had a machine lock up in this way. It begins with me alt-tabbing over to a window I haven’t used in a while, and the window just flat-out refuses to wake back up. Other than the one zonked window, everything seems fine, but the machine is actually in a death spiral now and there’s nothing I can do to save it. I can wait, or I can click on another window, or hit alt-Tab again. It doesn’t matter. In about ten seconds the mouse cursor will stop moving, and few seconds later the sound will begin stuttering and the machine will be borked.
Diagnosis
I can use the computer for hours without problems. I can even play games, which taxes basically every part of the machine. No problem. But if I walk away for twenty minutes it will be dead when I get back. Note that this is the inverse of how problems usually manifest. Usually the machine will fail when it’s being pushed, not when it’s idle.
Once the machine dies, it seems to recover incrementally. The first boot attempt will stall while the BIOS is still getting things going. Then I reboot again and I’ll get to the boot loader where I can pick which operating system to use. (Windows 7 or Ubuntu, the latter being installed mostly as a novelty.) If I boot into Win 7, then it will stall on the black logo screen. I’ll reboot again and I’ll get all the way to the blue logo screen, or perhaps get a brief glimpse of the desktop before it dies again. But after N attempts, it boots fine and the machine seems normal again. Once I successfully boot, the machine acts like nothing was wrong.
This problem leads to weeks of bafflement and confusion. It’s a problem with Win 7! My graphics card is overheating! The power supply is dying! The memory is going bad! I’ve seen a lot of sick machines in my day, but I’ve never seen one exhibit these symptoms in this pattern. I scan the hard drive, I test the memory, I re-install drivers. Everything seems fine. I’d blame Windows 7 (just because Ubuntu seems to work and I’m out of hardware to blame) but this doesn’t feel like a software problem.
There really is no upper limit on the number of random tests and guesses you can make, so usually I noodle around until I get bored with the problem and go back to ignoring it. At some point I begin to suspect the machine is simply haunted.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “The Thing That Broke”
