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Crashing 4-year-olds

Last week was a blur. First, my 4-year-old computer crashed. Shortly after, my four-year-old kid crashed (she became ill). Work came to an immediate halt. Rachel was on her 4-days of 12-hour hospital shifts. I faced a broken computer, a broken kid and the joy of running the house. Days were spent rebooting and shuttling CD's and my nights were spent soothing, medicating and taking care of our sick little girl. I didn't get much sleep.

I began as I was working on my 4-year-old computer, as I normally do. It began to fight me. Nothing unusual. I've been experiencing crashes and computer problems for over 6 months. I've been expecting the point of no return, but trying to put it off. You see, I'm an application guy. I'm not a hardware guy or a network guy. I like to USE the computer, not tinker with it.

I said, "Oh no, here we go." It's not a pleasant sensation, but who can complain after nearly four years of relatively trouble-free computing?

A sub-spooler system failure kept me from printing a check deposit slip. Rebooting didn't fix the printing problem. Restoring the system to an earlier time (which has, on occasion, been my saving grace) didn't fix the problem. I restored it to a month ago. After reboot, the computer froze and I found myself staring at a multi-colored taskbar and desktop. While it was pretty, it was also ugly. The cursor was toast. Keyboard entry didn't do anything but "bonk" at me, after entering a buffer's-worth of keystrokes. Then the computer said, "Game over." It initiated an auto-shutdown. Ack!

What was left? It was time to re-install the operating system from scratch.

That night, after day-care, my 4-year-old daughter decided to call it quits too. She initiated an auto-shutdown after contracting a nasty cold. The only difference between her shut-down and my computer shut-down, was that she waited until the middle of the night to shutdown, rather than shutdown in the morning.

To read about my week of fixing 4-year-olds ... carry on.

The 4-Year-Old Computer

Historically, I buy a new computer every four years. That's how long they seem to last. After four years, I'm drooling over a new-fangled box and barely able to tolerate the old one. My current computer has been different. I'm still pleased with it's performance and I think there's another two years of life left in it ... if only the operating system were stable.

This box is one I "put together" at NCIX. Purchased in November of 2003, it's a Pentium 4 2.8GHz, multi-threaded processor on an ASUS P4P800 Deluxe motherboard. It has 2 gigaBytes of RAM, a quarter of a terabyte of hard disk space and a high-speed CD ROM and combo DVD writer. I've got a conservative Matrox P650 graphics card, which supports two, 17" Samsung digital LCD monitors. It was a sweet ride in 2003 and it's still fun to drive, even though there are much faster boxes out there and much larger LCD screens.

The culprit seems to be the interplay of software applications, normal degredation of files, accumulation of software installs and removals and the general grunge that infects computers, over time. The solution - not one I am too excited about, because of the work involved - is to wipe the c: drive clean and reinstall a fresh operating system.

I am loathe to perform this task. Partly because it's a deep dive into a cold pool in which I normally don't like to swim, but it's mostly because I'm a tweaker and have things set up "just so". I hate losing that productivity edge and security of having "evertyhing in it's place". It will - literally - be months before I'm back at the same level of production.

Diving Into the Reinstall

Before I begin, I have hope for the future. It exists partly from some back-planning and partly from some future planning. Let me explain.

Some time ago, when I was a corporate working stiff (1999), I learned the beauty of separating the operating system from programs and personal data. I have 120 gigabytes of C: drive and it's dedicated mostly to the operating system. It can come and go and I couldn't give much of a care (except for all that tweaking). The stuff I care about, my actual program installs and (more importantly) my personal data - the stuff that's uniquely me - is all stored on another drive, which is separated into 2 partitions (uniquely named: "programs" and "data").

That's the back-plannning. I'm am already completely prepared to wipe my C: drive clean, reformat it and install a new operating system. My data and program in stalls (with tweaked files and folders), will remain untouched. Yay for back-planning.

The future planning revolves around a program called "Norton Ghost". This little program will allow me to completely backup my (new) C: drive. It will create an "image" of this drive (after I've reinstalled the operating system), which includes EVERYTHING on the drive (registry files, hidden files, etc). The idea is that I can take "snapshots" of C: at various times. After a while, if my computer goes belly up, I don't have to reinstall the operating system, drivers, upgrade/patch the O/S, install programs, etc - I only have to restore an earlier "image" of my C: drive, using Norton Ghost - all that "work" will be preserved in the C: backup AND I'll know that I'm installing a CLEAN version of it all.

Whew, what a time-saver that will be, should I need it!

So, I dive into the operating system reinstall. Here are my step-by-step notes. I post them mostly for me, but if they end up helping someone else, so much the better. A few caveats, before I begin:

• I use XP-Home (Service Pack 1 CD ROM)
• I don't RAID my drives
• My hardware is likely different from yours
• Windows XP detects my APCI computer