Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Scrolling Firefox Crashes My System - part 2
Keep an eye on the newspapers folks you should be seeing a headline like:
Dell Laptop Seen Re-entering Atmosphere Over Brisbane
Did I mention I hate Windows? I seem to have fixed the issue (said with fingers crossed, rabbit’s foot in hand, knocking on wood, stroking my four leaf clover while caressing the penny picked up in the street today). It appears that the video card driver was corrupt and after four reinstalls of said video card driver things are a little more sane here. Yes you read that right, it took four attempts to get the video card driver to install correctly.
This was an incredibly frustrating problem to diagnose and fix. The problem only occurred using Firefox and only on certain web pages when scrolling. It just so happened that it was happening on two blogs that I like to read regularly.
For anyone interested here are some useful things I have learned from the experience:
- Windows errors are logged in the Event Viewer, available through “administrative tools”. I was aware of this but had not used much to this point.
- Once you have an “event id” and “source” you can go to eventid.net for information on what problem generated that code. This is what tipped me off to the video card driver
- There is a separate issue with Windows Live Update that causes a period of 100% CPU usage on start up and connection to the internet. I am still looking for a solution for this one
- Laptop computers do not respond to profanity or physical abuse
- In times of high stress, the adage “panic slowly” is a good thing to keep in mind
As for the 100% cpu usage issue, I have no idea why it would be happening now and not before my recent clean install. I suspect a Windows update has broken something. It looks like I will have to turn off automatic updates until I can find a solution to this one. Process Explorer from sysinternals.com (now part of Microsoft it would appear) is an excellent free utility to see which services are running and the processes under those services.
The new system is still on the wish list. Might have to go back to still life modeling to pay for it 
“You can’t coach that”
