Ed Stoffel

There is a flurry of activity on social networking sites in recent years. I have found each of them to have a different focus, and serve a different purpose. MySpace serves the youngest crowd, and I originally joined to keep an eye on my kid's activity. But I soon found the site also spotlights emerging artists, including musicians, actors and comedians. Facebook is more for the college and workplace crowd, and where you connect to the people you really know as adults. Twitter is where you send and receive status updates, which can announce new posts and submissions, as well as just letting everyone know what's happening. Delicious is a bookmarking service allowing me to save and tag a long list of sites and articles I've found. Flickr is to share photos and YouTube is to share videos. I use Google Share to point out important emerging news from the world's hot spots and news of specific interest to the intelligence community. I post more general news including media industry stories to Facebook.

You'll also find links to various websites which I've established, and rss feeds from several of them. EdStoffel is my personal blog, FlyingReports is a journal I wrote when learning to fly, and David Stoffel is a tribute to the memory of my brother. Homesat Installation Help is a technical help site I wrote to consolidate the advise I gave to help homeschooling families setup satellite systems to receive the broadcast video curriculum.

In the end, what you see here is a selection of what I see each and every day from many of the sites and services, a collection of Stuff I've Heard.

Vista and I have gotten along well for the past few months, but all that has come to an end this week. Vista was installed and running fine until the failure of the computer two weeks ago. Around the time of some critical updates, the system just stopped working. Was this an OS failure, a motherboard failure, or a bad processor? The hard drive tested fine with Spinrite. Installing that hard drive in another computer still wouldn't boot the OS, and using the Vista install disc to attempt a repair failed to cure the problem. Was that because it was now mated with a different motherboard/processor combination? I don't know.

I purchased everything to build a new system: new Nvidia motherboard, Nvidia graphics card, an Intel Quad-core processor, a pair of Seagate SATA hard drives, new case and power supply. After installing Vista, the first problem I noticed was that it is painfully slow. This shouldn't be, with an Intel Quad-core processor, but it is. Things weren't slow with my previous Intel single-core 3.33Ghz processor. Vista turned my DVD-RW/CD-RW drive into DVD only, and failed to recognize my multi-media reader. Installation of a network drive failed (Netgear SC101), using Netgear's latest firmware and management utility version for Vista. The install disc for HP's office printer took over an hour to complete, and Quickbook's online update feature took nearly 3 hours to complete.

But the biggest, most frustrating problem was that Vista literally wouldn't let me do two things at once. With an internet browser open (either Explorer or Firefox), clicking on any link when the machine was otherwise busy would produce the (not responding) error to appear on the browser's title line. This even occurred when viewing a disk directory in Windows Explorer. If I clicked again, Vista produced a white-out mask across the screen, further indicating that the application was too busy to respond.

I was able to somewhat speed up Vista by following the recommendations of Black Viper to turn off unnecessary services. Problem is, it is difficult to be certain which services I really don't need.

After stewing about the problem overnight, I decided to pull the hard drive, insert a new one, and install Windows XP-SP3. It didn't take long to get the OS up and running, and I immediately noticed how fast all the applications installed themselves... much faster than with Vista. My DVD/CD drive works again, as well as my multi-media reader. I'll miss Vista's sidebar gadgets, but this machine now flies along with XP. I'll pack away my Vista OS disc, and we'll see if Microsoft ever gets the operating system working well before the emergence of Windows 7.

While I was out Thursday, our maids were cleaning in my office, vacuuming, and moving things around. After knocking my keyboard and mouse cables out, they plugged them back in, but crossed them into the wrong sockets.

When I returned, I found my keyboard and mouse both unable to wake up the computer. So I tried to reboot. The PC wouldn't respond to holding down the power button for 7 seconds... what I usually do if the PC freezes up. So I switched off power in the back and turned it back on, finally causing the PC to begin the rebooting process. Windows began to load, but froze part way in. I attempted a safe boot, but this too froze up.

I tried installing my hard drive in an old Dell computer, but Vista wouldn't boot there, telling me I needed to run recovery from the original OS disc. After several minutes of this, it told me it couldn't recover anything.

So I installed this hard drive as a secondary drive on an XP system. Here, I was able to view the drive just fine, and ran Spinrite to see if the drive was failing in some way. After running in recovery mode overnight, Spinrite reported that there were no problems with the drive.

Back in its original case, I attempted to boot the system, and it loaded the desktop, but after running the processor at 100% for about 30 seconds, it froze up again. I'm thinking it's a heat-related problem since it went further booting from a cold machine... but after warming up, it still failed. I removed the processor's fan and applied new thermal grease, but the failure still occurs.

Could the maids' plugging my keyboard and mouse in wrong have shorted out the motherboard? Could plugging in a vacuum close by have caused a fatal power surge? I have the equipment in a UPS, but if they also plugged into the UPS, a surge could have occurred inside of the protection, therefore reaching the computer.

I picked up a new power supply, jumping from 300W up to 450W, to see if it just needed a little more juice. That didn't solve the problem. I don't think it's an OS problem because sometimes, it won't even power up unless I wait a bit. That seems like a heat related problem, not a total failure. This is occurring even before the computer starts loading the OS.

I've ordered a new barebones kit with a new motherboard, processor, memory, and video card. I've also picked up a new SATA hard drive, and will use Seagate's disk wizard utility to clone my existing drive onto the new one. If that works, then I'll have my primary system up and running later in the week. Will it work to clone the drive and use it with new hardware? Or will Vista fuss about the change of a motherboard? Will it deactivate itself? I'd rather not reinstall everything if it can be avoided, but will do so if I must.

Then, I'll experiment to see what it takes to get the old one going again later. If a new processor doesn't do it, I may just scrap the computer, along with its video card and memory, which are incompatible with the new system.