All computers suck
I no longer have a working computer and I don’t know what to do about it.
I’m not going to bother whining about Vista, although to make the case for my despair I do have to state for the record that Vista has turned a working XP machine into a useless pile of software failures. I cannot count on any application completing its task. And I’m not referring to Vista’s propensity to interrupt me with security questions. E.g., I spent most of yesterday trying to move 20gb of music from Vista to my MP3 player, hoping that Vista would move all the files before crashing. It took many reboots. App after app freezes or crashes. And I can’t play a graphically intense game, even after downgrading to DX9, without a fresh reboot and no other apps running. Even then, it’s likely to freeze while I’m playing and almost certain to if I leave it alone overnight. And keep in mind that this is on a high-end machine with lots of RAM and hard drive, and a high-end graphics card. So, well, I guess I am going to bother whining about Vista.
Vista is worse than I’d expected (at least in my experience), but what really has me down is that my MacBook — which in most ways I love — continues to be unstable to the point of unusability. I had hoped that Leopard would end the frequent app crashes. So I did a fresh install. Things worked well for a a few weeks. Now it is crashing and freezing frequently. Last night during a presentation, Keynote totally froze, even thought I had done a fresh boot and had nothing else running, and I had to present with slides. (No, that was not an improvement.) This morning, I was interviewing JP Rangaswami for a podcast and Audacity froze and then crashed, wiping out the recording. I continue to get seemingly random app crashes of the kernel error sort. My system is unstable, which is worse than being broken.
I have run every diagnostic I can find, especially looking for bad RAM. I have done a scrape-and-clean reinstall. I literally don’t know what else to do.
I feel like I’m out of options. I don’t mind an occasional crash. But I now don’t have a working computer system — one I can rely on to, say, record a podcast or sync an MP3 player — and I’m actually pretty depressed about it.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
