Blue screen fixed, darn
It seems that every piece of windows software that you install these days adds some new crap to your startup. WindowsXP is slow enough to start! I found a nice little utility for discovering the set of tasks/services at startup, finding information on them, and turning them off. I also tweaked the set of Windows services based on a copy of the Black Viper site. Oh, and somewhere in all that I updated my Radeon drivers. All was fine for a few days but then out of the blue (ahem) my machine last night started to blue screen at the very end of startup. Days before that I was having odd occasional problems with my USB ports. Hmmm…
Luckily I could boot in safe mode. I tried undoing all my startup changes but no good. Because of the combination of blue screen and USB problems I was thinking it was the motherboard. Since I probably would not be able to still find the exact same chipset, I’d end up with a new mobo. That results in re-installing Windows and all my apps (unless someone can give reliable steps to just swap mobo drivers, I’ve tried but failed in the past). For all that effort, I might as well take the opportunity to upgrade from my Athlon64 3500+ to a snazzy dual processor Intel Core2Duo E6600 or E6700…
Unfortunately, a roll back to a previous restore point seems to have sorted it all out. Happy, but sad, at the same time.
December 29th, 2006 at 11:53 am
Restore points are one of those things that Windows definitely does better than the Mac — they don’t always save you, but they definitely do something.
You know, of course, you really don’t need an excuse to upgrade though.