If you’re been following my travails with my primary production system lately, you already know that I’ve been struggling to fix mysterious hangs and occasional bluescreens since the third week of July. On Wednesday, one of the two drives in my system drive mirror crashed. I not only replaced both of those drives, I also went ahead, bit the bullet, and did a clean reinstall of Vista Ultimate on that machine. The PC kept running properly through the night for the first time since my troubles began, so I got up the next morning to find a system that still responded to my attempts to log in (previously, leaving the machine alone for more than 2-3 hours would cause the GUI to freeze, and the Explorer interface to become inaccessible).

Continue reading Another BSOD in the wall →

This morning, I posted the news that circumstances beyond my control–a crashed member of the mirrored disk pair that makes up the system drive on my production PC–forced me to reinstall Vista on that machine. I’m now more or less finished with that chore, though I still have many more applications to dig up and reinstall to completely rebuild the desktop environment present before the crash. That said, I probably won’t reinstall everything anyway: I’ve become a believer in keeping my production machine simpler and less cluttered up than it had been in the months leading up to the crash. That’s what test machines are for!

Continue reading Back to Work, More or Less →

OK, I have to start this blog with a confession: I’m an inveterate system tinkerer, and am always looking for something better for my system (if not for something rated as the best of its kind). For example, this approach has led me to skip using a good all-around security suite in favor of picking the best elements of each kind by itself (anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, anti-spam, rootkit detector, intrusion detection/prevention, system file and state monitoring, and so forth).

Continue reading Best-of-Breed Apps Aren’t Always Best for Vista →

In a recent blog of mine “Hot outside, hot inside too”, I reported on the effects of a failed air conditioner on the temperatures inside my PC. Now that repairs on complete and things are back to what passes for normal around here, I thought it might be interesting to see how current temperatures compare. Incidentally and interestingly, it seems my memory of how my PC works and how it actually works are reasonably close, if not completely in agreement.

Continue reading Cool, calm, and corrected: Temps back to normal →

OK, so I’m finally starting to relax a little bit. After six weeks of intermittent crashes and daily blue-screens, I’ve now gone four days on my production Vista machine without a major hiccup. I’ve still had a few minor problems, as I’ll soon report, but it now seems somewhat safe to say that the system is reasonably stable and appears inclined to stay that way. I have one word to comment on this state of affairs: “Hooray!”

Continue reading Following the Breadcrumbs in Event Viewer →

It’s hot, hot, hot here in Round Rock, TX. And alas, when I say it’s hot here, I mean in the house! Our inside cooling stack for the main A/C apparently iced up yesterday, and quit working. I’ve had to cut the main unit off, so our only cooling in the house right now is literally trickling down the staircase (the coolest place in the house) from the still-operational upstairs unit and providing some cooling for the whole house.

Continue reading Hot outside, hot inside too →

In keeping with my ongoing Vista troubleshooting exercise, I’ve gotten into the habit of dropping in on my Event Viewer every couple of days to see what kinds of errors and warnings are popping up. By keeping tabs on this information, and researching stuff I haven’t seen before or don’t understand, I keep learning more and more interesting stuff about Vista. This morning, I found a new error from the Volume Shadow Copy Service (which shows up in the Windows Application log as a source named VSS). Because VSS is important to maintaining Vista operating and file system integrity, I started digging more deeply into this right away.

Continue reading Interesting Event Viewer Error Message →

Last week, my blog “Should Software Makers Clean Up After Themselves?” expressed my consternation that responsible software vendors could create uninstall utilities that don’t completely clean up after themselves. I reported that one well-known program that I just uninstalled left 462 registry entries and 151 files behind. I was wrong: it also installed the Viewpoint Media Player, which runs as viewpointservice.exe, and not only left it running on my machine, it also continued to load up and run at boot time, even with no consuming processes to serve.

Continue reading Lesson Learned: More on Post-Uninstall Clean-up →

In digging further into my BSOD from Thursday, August 7, using the Windows Debugger I observed that the ultimate cause was a module named pctsSvc.exe (see attached screenshot below). A quick process lookup informs me that this is part of PC Tools Spyware Doctor runtime environment. Additional research on Windows crashes related to this module indicates that a remove/reinstall maneuver often addresses the problem (see this PC Tools forum thread for more info).

Continue reading More on the latest BSOD →

This looked just plain weird to me. When I checked Reliability Monitor and the installation of the generic volume shadow copy devices I couldn’t make out a pattern even though it was there to be found. I even posted queries about this to vistaforums.com, techsupportforum.com, and to Microsoft Tech Support, but it took a Facebook email to one of the demiurges in the Windows pantheon–namely, Mark Russinovich–to get to the bottom of the matter (more on this to follow at the end of this story).

Continue reading Mystery Solved — 103 Devices, 5 Volumes →