My home PC is nothing to brag about. Actually it was 5 years ago when it was new, but not today. These days I use it for Quicken, surfing the web and email. Anything 'cool' for work I use my laptop, which is a pretty powerful machine.
Last week MS decided to force my XP OS to upgrade to SP3. I looked around quickly for 'gotcha's' and didn't see anything, so I let it install.
30 minutes later, the PC reboots and hangs. I reboot it again, and it starts, but starts thrashing the disk. I leave it for 30 minutes, but it still hasn't fully started. Turn it off again, this time it wouldn't show the login screen. I gave up and went to bed.
Next day I found some interesting issues with SP3: first, you need to disable your anti-virus before installing. (Reason is most have a feature that prevents critical system files from being updated. The same ones SP3 wants to change.)
I got home, used the fallback features to the checkpoint before the install and started over. This time I disabled Norton anti-virus and Windows Defender. Still had to let it sit for 30 minutes while the disk thrashed, but it eventually settled down.
Frustrated with the PC, I wanted a new one. Of course ;-) Researching found some good Dell's for around $500, but since I had mine working now I couldn't justify a new one. Of course Deb's PC is few months older than mine, so I'd need to get 2 if I wanted any peace in the house.
So I went and bought another 512 MB of RAM for my PC and wow, what a difference. Since I was only surfing and doing email I didn't think I needed a lot, but with the new ram things are much faster. Looking at Task Manager I see I'm using 614 MB now, which means I was swapping pretty heavily before.
I still want a new machine, but can't justify it. Maybe we need a good thunderstorm ...
No comments:
Post a Comment