Wellll ... Pandora the Dell Inspiron laptop is home, but she ain't happy yet, and neither am I. She came home with a brand new solid state 500MB harddrive which was supposed to make her lightning fast, but the fact is, she's as slow as she ever was -- still overheating (fans running up to max several times per minute, and now the case feels hot to the touch, which it didn't before it was "fixed"), and if you pop open the Task Manager and take a peek at the numbers...
Hmm. CPU Usage is 100%, physical memory is 80%, with nothing but a browser running, and spiking as high as 88% when she's trying to do something for me -- like copy a picture over, or open a file. Can't be right. She just came from the shop, and the trouble started instantly the updates were made to Service Pack 1. It's not a virus; not anti-virus software; not "too many processes" running in the background. There's nothing to account for it --
And you just wait till you want to open, close, copy or move a file! You can twiddle the thumbs for half a minute before the CPU finds enough cycles to accommodate the poor old user.
Soooo, I'm thinking about sending a message to the technician who did the job, bouncing the numbers off him and asking if he wants to take another look. Just to be safe, I'm spending a lot of this weekend backing up files in case the best option is the nuclear one: the fabled command line, "Format C:" ... sends shivers down the spine, dunnit? The thing is, the system takes so long to copy files. Is taking about an hour per gig to transfer stuff to the external harddrive. Which can't be right. And it means a comprehensive backup is a long, long, long job with the constant risk of the computer cooking itself.
Not much I can do about getting tech support on Saturday afternoon, so I'm going to go putter in the garden, make some tea and take a book outside. It's a glorious winter's day, warm and sunny with a brilliant blue sky and everything starting to bloom in preparation for spring. The big furry caterpillars have already hatched. These guys --
Must upload some garden pictures here. Note to self ... soon as this computer can handle the graphics.
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