Nightwill MIW

It means Missing in Warcraft of course.

So what has been happening?  Its a bit too complicated to give a twitter sized answer, so I figured Id put  a note in here.  Cause I'm just egotistical enough to think people will want to know and heck its my blog :D

A few days before Christmas my computer started slowing down...like really slowing down.  Eventually with 5 minutes to boot and longer to perform simple tasks it was basically unworkable.

Being at least a little tech savvy cause, ya know, I'm a nerd I started disabling and enabling things and running scans and everything I could think of.  Then Windows Explorer started crashing.

For those of you who don't know that's the system that manages the files on your computer.  Its the program that has become the backbone of Windows and it is the linchpin that holds it all together.  Without it your computer is trying to leave the house and cant remember where its glasses, keys, wallet or even pants are.

So this is bad, really really bad.  But during this there are some really strange things going on.  I started playing around in Star Trek Online with my sisters (Free to play and We're Trekkies) and if it was running it has NO lag.  In fact when Windows Explorer Crashed it would keep running just fine.  Nothing else on the computer would work of course but at least I wasn't gameless.

It is a huge amount of fun by the way.  I wouldn't call it a perfect game and since its free to play it probably wont ever get there but...heck its free and you can have tribbles!

I looked in my box and I didnt see smoke, temperatures seemed to be ok, so...off to my sister who knows hardware.

We spent a night tinkering and checking the power supply, cables, and the like before deciding Windows needed to be reinstalled.  Not the most pleasant task but not the worst ether since I keep Windows on its own hard drive to keep its cooties away from programs I care about.

Just in case, ya know....

Windows was working fine after the installation and everything seemed like it was working fine.  Oh wait my archive hard drive wasnt plugged in yet .. it ... it ...

So yes the whole time it was my old hard drive going bad and making enough errors to pull down my machine.  The reason Star Trek was running was it didn't have a thing to do with that drive.  Thats the 'good' news.  The bad news is that most everything I used or was saving was tied into that drive.

So recovery is a little slow but it is proceeding.  By new year I should be able to do whatever I want with the Internets.  And lesson learned about relying too much on one drive for backing things up.  Got to have more survival instincts than a Red Shirt.

Happy Holidays and have a great new year!