It's not the memory - Memtest-86 gives it a clean bill of health.

It's not the disk - checkdsk runs fine, and my applications have no problems.

Windows says it's a disk problem but it acts like it's a memory problem.

What can cause that?

The pagefile. The evil, good-for-nothing, rat bastard pagefile.

I thought to myself If this were a real operating system, it would have a log of all these errors.

Then I thought, It is a real operating system. A crappy one, but a real OS nonetheless.

And it has crappy log files, but they exist, and they were full of errors - all relating to the pagefile.

As soon as I manage to get the darn thing to boot, I'm going to disable it.

Again. I already disabled it, but it didn't take. Who knows why; this is Windows.

Okay, it finished booting, and now has no pagefile.

Let's see if it crashes.

...

So far, so good. I did get one of those "delayed write failed" errors (so maybe it is the disk after all), but I managed to watch last week's episode of Haruhi Suzumiya on my new TV without anything catching fire, blowing up, crashing, or collapsing into a closed space.

Which is good enough for now.

Tomorrow I send the motherboard from my new PC back for replacement. Then I plan to (finally!) get the forms processing working in Minx. This is an example of what you can do with fairly simple templates; I intend to expand on that. A lot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:19 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

1 Have you tried deleting the pagefile.sys file and re-enabling virtual memory? Or better yet if you have enough space, rename the pagefile.sys and leave it there (and then re-enable virtual memory), in case there is a flaw in your drive where the pagefile is.

For some reason, when you turn off virtual memory, XP doesn't delete the file. Mine got so fouled up that only the above prescription worked. Of course, my drive was so fouled up that even S.M.A.R.T. noticed it

Posted by: Kevin at June 22, 2006 03:34 AM (+hkUo)

2 Delayed writes failed? That sounds like you've got problems in the disk I/O system, whether it is an intermittently failing drive, cable, or ata controller, its hard to say without a better diagnostic than chkdsk. Hmm... I once was having numerous disk problems which turned out to be a bad power supply--the +12V rail was nearly 20% too low and a number of drives really didn't like it to be that low.
.

Posted by: kayle at June 22, 2006 01:35 PM (Qsm1J)

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