Strange Windows Error
January 11th, 2006 by PotatoI’ve had a strange error in Windows XP for several months now. It’s intermittent and as far as I can tell, random. I’ve had no luck searching the web for solutions, so any advice would be greatly valued.
What happens is basically folders will stop responding. I can open up one folder, and then a few seconds later if I try to open another folder file within that folder, there will be no response. No error message, nothing. Right-clicking a file to try to get properties also yields no information. During this error opening subfolders never works, but sometimes I can open files (though I can’t right-click for properties, and if files do open, there’s always a 20 second or so delay).
Usually the last folder I successfully open won’t have a menu bar, just a white space with the windows logo (see the image below). In case you don’t see the distinction, that space usually contains “File, Edit, View…” etc.
If I wait long enough (usually 10 minutes or more), functionality comes back. If it happened once though, it will likely happen again within a few hours, and every few hours until I reset. It very rarely happens within a day of a reset.
In other news, another record number of hits yesterday: a whopping 79. It’s enough to make me wonder if there’s someone out there hitting refresh a million times a day (or if my own testing of the RSS capabilities did the same… I don’t think they would, but it’s possible). Hardly anyone’s leaving comments, so I’m inclined to think that this isn’t real traffic. If it is though, it might be time to look into a new web host to handle that sort of load. I’ve had suggestions for blacksun.ca, hostgator.com, and lunarpages.com. If anyone has any other suggestions, or more importantly, if you get any sort of kickback for referring me, leave a comment! (All else being equal, I might as well go with the host who’ll give my friends a free month, eh?)
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January 12th, 2006 at 10:15 am
Not to rain on your parade (is it rain or reign?), but a lot of those are probably me. I probably am generating a number of hits as I move back and forth between you stories posting comments because I neglect to do so. Do you have it set to track only one hit per IP per day?
January 12th, 2006 at 10:17 am
oh ya… the windows error.
I get that too. Though for me, I pretty much attribute it to hard drive access latency gone total apeshit loco.
Basically explorer can’t access anything to do with that drive until it figures itself out (which can be a while).
I think THIS will fix it.
(hope I did that linking right… since I can’t edit posts…)
January 12th, 2006 at 10:17 am
Nope I didn’t.
here’s the URL. Go nuts.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/12/05/hyperos_dram_hard_drive_on_the_block/
January 12th, 2006 at 1:05 pm
I can edit posts. Fixed for you :)
Thanks for the link. I hope it isn’t hard drive latency, both because I have a fancy SATA drive, and because it’s not something I can easily fix (the contents of your link notwithstanding :)
I do believe it’s “rain on your parade”. My counter is primitive: it counts the number of times you load the outside frame for the site (the one that keeps the holypotato.com address in the URL bar). So it will count more than once per IP (basically once per refresh), but it should only count once per session (i.e.: if you load up the main page, then go to leave comments, that should all be done in the sub-frame and not count as a hit for me).
One of these days I’ll figure out how to get Apache to tell me the IP logs so I can get a real count, or better yet, see my latest post (coming up in a few minutes).