2015-04-02:

Fri:
A somewhat uneventful day. The guy I saw in the morning admitted to seeing blue screens and looking his motherboard over I saw a leaking capacitor, so I brought it home and changed it. On the way I bought the stuff for some soup to make for mom.

Those things done, I cleaned his machine out and let it run to see if it would, and checked my websites for the day.

About 2:30 I was out again to return the system and saw my parents. Mom has 8 more treatments to go, so she's looking forward to it being done.

Came back here, ate dinner, finished chapter 109. Good to be writing again.

Sat:
One job in the morning, which amounted to cleaning her printheads a couple of times and ordering her a battery for her older laptop. Exciting stuff.

Came back, started chapter 110. Made cookies for the gang.

Went out at 4:00, we were originally supposed to play Stan's game, but then we didn't.

We did try a confusing new train game, and got through two turns by 11:00, when Stan/Sean left. We agreed now that we knew a little better what the heck we were doing, to give it another shot.

Then we played some Mario Kart, and tied for first place on our last race.

Cold and nasty out still, in the twenties. Ugh.

Sun:
Finished chapter 110.

Watched a few things, including a movie from Iceland, of all places.

Got a few calls over the weekend, so I'll have a pretty busy day tomorrow.

Mon:
Morning was slightly troublesome. Waited a half hour to make my latest IRA deposit. It wasn't really that busy, the two people that can do it were just tied up, doing what I have no clue, but something.

Otherwise, got oil, and groceries.

Out at 12:30, got rid of one of my many flat screen monitors and looked over a laptop for the psychologist place.

Next one wasn't too far away, a clean out in the ritzy apartment complex by where my parents used to live. Pretty normal, didn't take too long.

Then the last one she said wouldn't start, but it started for me just fine. I booted it four times, and the first two times were really slow, but the next two were quite fast, so figure that one out.

Ran the standard scans, removed her expired antivirus, that sort of thing.

Got the HD in that I ordered last week. Came a day earlier than even I expected, so I started putting that together.

Got 2,330 words into chapter 111, I'll finish it tomorrow, as I have one job scheduled. Hopefully can get this PC back, it's just about done too.

Tues:
Finished chapter 111.

Went to my one job, his identity had been stolen, so he wanted to make sure it wasn't the computer. I checked it out.

Finished the PC I had here, basically blew the dust out of it and such.

Changed my oil, no troubles there.

Created Mizzy's birthday gift, as that's coming up. Can you believe that five months later, they (shapeways) still has yet to get the ceramics replacement in place, so I still can't make her "christmas" gift yet. Sigh. Anyway, hopefully this works out.

Not many calls today, not many at all… sighing.

Working out what to do next and Sean wanted to do Borderlands, so we did that.

Wed:
Didn't reach anyone yesterday, didn't reach anyone today. So, I got the first episode of Sesame Street taped for the lady.

Not much exciting until the afternoon, when I went over to the mortgage place to set up the new-new computer and get the old-new computer wiped to go back. This one was at least 1.9 Ghz rather than 1.0 but with them changing email services and that stupid scanning thing it still took me two hours.

Then finally got ahold of the lady to get her PC back, but only saw her son. Got the PC hooked back up. Their printer is messed up, but it's an inkjet so what can you really expect?

So I collected zero dollars today. Hope to get some soon… the mortgage place owes me a cool hundred now.

I say cool, but really I don't think it has a temperature of its own, does it?

Sunny, but there is still snow on the ground.

Thurs:
Various troubles to recount today, so hurray for that?

Firstly, somewhat "warm" today but it didn't melt all the snow. Oh, and we'll be getting some more so, thanks for that.

Jobs: Morning one was the worst. She was having printer trouble so I tried accessing it with the IP address. No luck. Restarted it. Then got on, so it's the printer most likely. But she noted, in passing, that her machine was slow. I did't think it was that bad, but it only had 2GB of RAM so I put some more in. Then I looked further into it because I like to the thorough about things. This was my mistake.

Turns out the machine is using 20% of the CPU power for "System Interrupts." Now the last time this happened, a few weeks ago you might recall, I just updated the video card drivers and "chipset" and it was fine.

Not so much here. I've brought the machine back (and worked on it all afternoon once returning from my other two jobs) and it still has the same issue. What have I done?

Updated all drivers.
Turned off all hardware I can in the bios, even USB, and put a PCI USB card in to compensate. (Because it only has USB, not PS/2)
Tried a different video card.
Ran sfc /scannow
Removed Optical drive
Tried booting machine from USB using my adapter to move the internal HD to USB in case it was the SATA ports. (This made it blue screen, wonderful work MS, just wonderful).
(Did I mention the machine is totally fine in safe mode?)
Booted with all services and Start up items turned off.
Removed Panda.
Tried a different power supply, and it didn't boot at all.
Installed some developer tools and ran traces and found it's related to hal.dll (so helpful) and HalpProfileInterrupt which doesn't help me at all when I look it up.
Tried updating the BIOS (Which failed? At least it said it did, but when I went to run it again it gave the right version… so…)

Wait… has that done it? It's sitting at 0 like it should. Why would updating the BIOS cause this issue to go away?

I HATE PCS SO MUCH.

Well, that was… a word that's yet to be invented to describe how it was, but it was that, and way too much of it.

Got only one call today, and of course didn't reach her. She said her address and if I didn't get her to just leave a message and maybe come tomorrow anyway so I will.

So tomorrow I tape the second Sesame Street episode and then go over there at 1:00. Then see my parents.

No info on game Saturday, so I guess we'll see about that.

Oh right, the rest of today. Wouldn't want to forget the other rage inducing misadventures.

Let's see, I was late by about fifteen minutes to my 12:00 because of the awful machine, and set about looking at his two machines. Using the AOL website for some reason brings up a flash error for him, despite flashstop being installed so it shouldn't even be loading. I found out how to disable it on that one site so that should keep it quiet. A few other small questions answered.

Then the printer at the next place. Or should I say windows? Because it wasn't the printer's fault. When I arrived I discovered the "print spooler" system had gone away, so I restarted it and rebooted. Then I got an error message about it crashing, which I looked up. There was this whole procedure I had to follow, booting into safe mode, deleting this file and that one, then making registry changes (my favorite part of windows by far). Then reloaded the printer.

For a wonder, the reload worked and the error went away, even after rebooting.

So at least we ended on a positive note. Oh wait, no we didn't. I came home and worked on this piece of dell for… four hours. Yeah.

Oh, happy early easter everyone, go celebrate those pegan gods and the return of "spring" with family and friends.

We should be playing some borderlands tonight, so I'm going to make sure I'm set for tomorrow and thus, I'm posting this a little early. Oh, you don't care.

Well, anyway, have a good weekend and I'll see you next week.