Open Buddha

We had a power surge, brownout and then blackout earlier today. After the power came back, my main computer, which was completely off during all of this, would give a “machine exception error” after I logged into my account on XP and then reboot. Neat.

I figured that the surge had fried a part in my relatively new machine so I swapped out RAM, etc. to see if I could identify the part. No behavior change.

Because the last time this kind of behavior was seen was when I had a bad device driver for my wireless card, I tried logging in as administrator this evening. No reboots. So, either by coincidence or something else, I have a corrupt driver or similar that gets started after I log into my account. I took the easy solution: I made a new account on the machine, overrode security on my files (like my school files, my music, my archives of other documents or images) and copied them over to the new account. Even though I copied over setup folders, this can be hit or miss on Windows depending on how the data is referenced. Windows Media Player correctly kept the same library file so I didn’t need to redect my music. Itunes, for some reason, correctly listed all of my music but couldn’t find the actual files when I tried to play them. So, I’m readding all of my music there and I’m being forced to redownload all of my podcasts even though the files are still on my system.

It could be worse since I thought I’d probably fried a chip in the motherboard. Of course, half of my RAM is sitting in front of me and my case is taken apart so I’ll have to fix it soon. I was lucky that I installed almost all of my software for “All users” so I don’t have to completely set up my software from scratch.