It Is A Good Day To Die 2501

I’ve been having continued slow-motion breakdown of Win2K on the A7V133; I’ve had failures to boot, and rather substantial chunks of my Outlook Express files vanishing for a while.

Thank you all for your suggestions. Right now, there is a new prime suspect; the hard drives.

The problems began when I ran the system at 154Mhz, and continued and got worse when I throttled down to 150, then 133.

This does point to hard drive corruption. Now whether the problem was caused by the hard drives corrupting themselves, or something else remains to be seen.

I’ve been using Win98 for work the last couple days at 7.5X133, and performance has been flawless. Then again, I almost never use Win98 for work, it never got a chance to get beat up at high FSB.

So my task is simple: reformat and reinstall Win2K, run it at 133Mhz for a couple days to see if there’s any problems, then crank it up to 150Mhz again to see if the problems reemerge.

Before I can do that, though, I do have to look into what one person told me in an email. He actually explained some of those bizarre codes you get when this occurs.

So after I post my articles for the day, I have to go on a suicide mission with my machine. I have to get it to BSOD a couple times to see those codes, and see if that tells me what the particular problem is.

I must say suicide missions are much better when you aren’t the one dying. 🙂

Feels a little odd, though, this isn’t exactly a “Die Hard” mission. More like “Die Already!” Doesn’t leave you feeling too heroic.

Can’t even get the satisfaction of calling it “test to destruction,” not when the killer is likely to be opening up a webpage. 🙂

What’s important to learn from this is that just about any problem like this you might have could be caused by a number of items, not just one. Expecting that there’s only one possible reason for something not working just doesn’t work.

You need to identify all the reasons you can. Then try to eliminate them one by one, and don’t be surprised if it turns out to be none of the ones you thought.

Email Ed