Well, after having a good day at work on Saturday I had a real shitty day on Sunday. I screwed up bigtime and caused about 20 minutes of downtime. Oops.
I migrated my main site to b2evolution. It is an extremely powerful blogging backend, but it is also extremely complicated compared to other blogware. I will be experimenting with it for a while and maybe I’ll finally get around to learning some PHP.
I was having some major computer problems over the past few days. It was randomly crashing with various error messages, lock-ups, and blue screens. (The errors were PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA and IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL from blue screens and various driver failure messages from within Windows). After reading tons of information on similar problems I had narrowed everything down to a hardware problem. Of course it could have been the RAM, motherboard, hard drive, network card, or video card. I started with the RAM. I took out one DIMM and was still having issues. I replaced that DIMM with the one I had taken out and Windows wouldn’t even complete the boot sequence before crashing. I suspected that I had two faulty memory modules, one more defective that the other, but I wanted to check a few other things to make sure. I updated my BIOS and drivers, but that was no help and I ran various tests on my hard drive with inconclusive results. I finally decided that I could switch hard drives and see if the problem cleared up. But before doing that I checked online one more time to see if I could find a simpler solution. One online forum had a post with similar symptoms to my own. The root cause of that one was a faulty video card. I remembered last week having some video problems that I thought were overheating related. I bought a fan for my video card and the problems seemed to go away, but perhaps the damage had already been done. I swapped out my video card with an old one and so far everything is back to normal. No crashes or blue screens since the swap. This is why I never recommend you build your own computers unless you REALLY know what you are doing.
