The BSOD is Back

Starting to have major problems with Mordion (my notebook) again... The hard drive (yes, not the fan this time) has returned to its former habit of making obnoxious clicking/tweeting sounds and crashing the OS. (Note it only crashes when the noise is made. I don't consider that coincidental.) I just got a BSOD about an hour ago -- it was a 0x77 Kernel Stack Inpage Error, with the specific string listed with MS as being either a boot sector virus, drive controller problems, or mechanical failure.

Considering the noises this thing is making, and that it checked out clean when carefully checked with an updated copy of NAV, I'm pretty sure it's a physical problem with the drive. Ugh. The most annoying aspect of this is that if I do bring it back to CompUSA before it's totally, utterly dead, they'll probably just hold it for six weeks and act confused when it doesn't BSOD constantly like last time.

Luckily for me, I was able to pick up a 50-disc spindle of Memorex CD-Rs on eBay last week for $6 (well, plus $7 shipping, but that still is a lot better than retail!), so I can do a proper backup again. My last backup is a bit outdated, in part because I was running low on discs and couldn't afford to buy a new set. I'd do a full backup to my tower, but it's unfortunately in one of the rooms that has no power, and I haven't had the energy to relocate it.

My little brother has a DVD-R now. I'm jealous, I want one! *grin* Maybe I'll luck out and Mordion will suffer motherboard failure just in time to be warranty-replaced by a model with a DVD-R. I'd say that's extremely unlikely, except that's pretty much what happened with my first Toshiba laptop as well as the Compaq they replaced it with, which effectively earned me a brand-new notebook a year later. For anybody wondering, btw, unless you want to suddenly have a new computer under warranty, don't do stupid stuff like run processor-intensive software on your notebook for hours while it's in a padded laptop-case that just might not allow the system to dissapate heat. Especially if the case happens to also block the fans.

No, I did not do that to them entirely. In fact, it was *safe* to run them in that case most of the time, as they usually ran cool enough -- the big problem (imho) was that I tried it while playing online graphical games for a day at a time. I could be wrong, though. It might also be that my incredible clumsiness from dyspraxia damaged something, because shortly before each computer died, I had accidentally bumped it severely into something.

I'd like to say that despite the intermittent instability, I'm really happy with how durable my Sony metal (aluminum?) notebook is. Mordion has now been dropped on the floor, knocked off desks, done literal backflips off the bed, hit rather hard with solid objects because of my depth perception issues... "He" has landed hard enough to crack the case on a solid PCMCIA card in half, and at some point during one of the falls off the bed, landed on its screen hard enough to actually break the latch off.

(Sadly re-attaching the piece was a failure. A scary one, at that: I glued the latch back on, but it broke off while in the lock because I wasn't careful to make sure the glue was totally dry, and then fell through the slot. From the way the rattling stopped after a while, I have a horrible suspicion that the piece glued itself to one of the internal components.)

Why am I saying all of this? Well, mostly because I feel bad for griping about a computer that actually has come through absolute abuse and continued to work. My Sony metal Clie, Maree, has endured similar-but-worse with no problems aside from those caused by my experimenting heavily with software and "cracks." So the truth is, yes, I have a notebook with some drive issues, but considering the way it is treated -- not by my own choice so much as my incredible motor-skill issues -- it's actually doing impressively well.

Okay, more to post on other issues, I'll shut up now. *grin*

Posted by moggy at November 09, 2003 07:17 PM | TrackBack