Any time something surfaces in Event Monitor that I’ve never seen before, it always piques my interest. My usual practice is to scan the Event Monitor’s Windows Application and System logs every Monday morning to see what might need my attention. This morning, among the items that caught my eye was this message “Application (pid 4684) cannot be restarted – Application SID does not match Conductor SID” from an unfamiliar source–namely the Restart Manager.

Continue reading Restart Manager Surfaces In Event Monitor →

Now that my production system has been stable for nearly two weeks, I’m finally getting around to dealing with other aspects of its behavior that aren’t quite right. This morning, I resolved to address two issues that have been vexing me lately: an occasional but frequent case of “cursor freeze” from my mouse, and regular but brief stuttering or freeze in audio playback through Windows Media Player 11 or Windows Media Center. Let’s tackle these in their order of occurrence here.

Continue reading Fixing Vista Mouse and Audio Nits →

This morning, I began my day with some modest self-congratulation, or perhaps just a small sigh of relief that my recent Vista crises have abated. It’s now been 9 days since my last bluescreen and my System Stability Index in Reliability Monitor is nearly at 8.0 for the first time since August 11. I sincerely hope I’m not jinxing myself to make this statement but it appears that my production system is finally stable. Zounds! What a wild ride it’s been.

Continue reading 98 Bottles of Beer…No, Wait! 98 Generic volume Shadow Copy Devices →

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 →