Computer Issues.....

So last night, as soon as I got home from work I opened FireFox to check my favorite sites (my deviantART page, the Spiderweb Software forum, Urban Dead and Facebook). Firefox would shut down the moment I started surfing around, popping up a notification that said "Firefox has encountered an error, please send a crash report to the developers, blah, blah, etc. And then there was two buttons, to Quit Firefox or Restart Firefox. At first I thought it was the Urban Dead website that was causing the issue, as it would crash as soon as I started typing my login and password. But when I restarted and visited a different site, it would crash again. Finally I just chose "Quit Firefox".

I then opened up Internet Explorer and went to Urban Dead (had to log in to spend my action points for the day). I managed to successfully play Urban Dead (leveled up, whooo!) and then tried to visit another site, at which point IE crashed. I went into the Task Manager to find out what was causing the issue, at which point my system restarted without any warning whatsoever (no Blue Screen of Death). When the computer came back on again I got an error message about my logitech driver failing, and then I went into WinPatrol's startup menu to disable that and any other unncessary startup items (like AdAware, Lexmark printer stuff, etc).

At that point, Win Patrol froze along with my entire computer so I had to restart manually. After the restart, I opened up LogonStudio and BootSkin and changed them both back to the default Logon Screen and Load screen, then disabled them from the startup menu as well. At that point, my computer then crashed and restarted again. After the restart, I tried to do some backups of my data in preparation for reformatting my hard drive, but the computer was so slow I had to restart again.

When it came back up again, I quickly pushed the F8 key to get the loading options and I picked safe mode so when the computer restarted, it didn't seem to have any issues. I copied the files on my desktop (two game install packages) to my secondary hard drive so they wouldn't get wiped out (it took a really long time, the computer was still slow even though most processes didn't load), and then opened up my backup program (Karen's Replicator, a great freeware program that I absolutely love!). I had to create some new backup tasks for it for various games and programs (Dungeon Siege LOA, Rocketdock, Geneforge, Geneforge 5, Fatal Hearts, Neverwinter Nights, etc). I also went through my deskop wallpaper folder that was saved in my Windows folder and deleted a whole bunch of images. At this point it was 11:30 at night and I had two pieces of toast with cheese spread for supper. I then started running Karen's Replicator and after it had finished a lot of tasks, I went to the Recycle Bin to empty it out. Then my computer crashed on me again. After I had restarted it again in Safe Mode, I ran Karen's Replicator again and left it running when I went to bed (at 1:30 AM).

When I got up in the morning, it was obvious that my computer had crashed again, so I restarted again in Safe Mode and opened up Karen's Replicator and checked the log of the jobs. The last job (a backup of my secondary hard drive) had not completed so I left that running when I got ready and left for work. Hopefully when I get home it will have completed and I can get started on reformatting the computer. I had so much I wanted to do last night too -- I had to put away Heather's clean laundry, write a new blog post on my favorite freeware games, maybe play a computer game -- but none of that got done. Instead I'm writing a new blog post about my computer issues on my work computer. :(

So, I probably won't be back until Sunday or so....not only do I have to reformat, but then I have to update drivers, update Windows XP to SP3, install my programs and games again, etc. At least I have my setting files and saved game files on my backup drive now. It was hard to come to work today, I just wanted to stay home and fix my computer! You know how it is, when it's broken you just want to get it fixed. And my computer needed a reformat anyways....ever since I tried out Google Chrome my computer has seemed slower, messed up even. So I am going to have a fun weekend. :P Actually, I really do enjoy messing around with my computer, so it won't be all bad.

Anyways, wish me luck!