I hate having to spend time troubleshooting system problems when I need to be working on projects. I have some type of system corruption on my PC desktop so now I have spend hours either repairing (which rarely works) or reinstalling the OS. I really hate windows right now. I have stayed away from Windows 8 precisely because of the problems with it. While it isn’t as bad as the infamous Windows Vista, it is still pretty bad. Thus when I built my newest desktop I decided to stay with Windows 7. But even Windows 7 is still Windows.
So I spent the better part of the last two days troubleshooting a problem on my PC only to find out that there was a minor glitch in the system that caused a process to over consume memory. The process was spawned as the Windows 7 OS tried to generate thumbnail previews for the mp4 movie files in my library. I disabled the thumbnail process and replaced it with a third party freeware app to generate the previews and it fixed one of the major problems in about two minutes. My system is still only able to use half of the memory in the machine, but it is a start. Oh, did I mention that I am learning to hate Windows again.
The glitch had the system trying to generate the thumbnail previews until it got stuck in a loop. The loop caused the system to continue to consume memory until the system crashed. I have 16gb of ram in the system but the OS, while seeing the whole 16, only has 8gb of ram slated as “usable”. I forgot to mention that the system stopped seeing the CDROM and blu-Ray burners that are installed in the machine. I found that out by trying to create a windows system repair disc and being told that there is no CD burner installed in the machine. I now am planning to leave the system alone until I can do a backup and full reinstall when the new hard drives arrive in a few days. Oh, and I now officially hate Windows again.
For the record, I am an OS agnostic. I have Windows, Macs, and Unix systems in my home network. Part of the reason I have all of these is that I had to teach Computer info systems for a number of years in addition to teaching New Media. When I am focusing on my creative outlets I do prefer Apple because I don’t have to be distracted by hardware and software conflicts. However I prefer Windows for my PC gaming and for file sharing. I prefer UNIX for the security and for anything dealing with large scale networking. My main beef with Apple in the last few years has been their price points and the expandability, or lack thereof, in their designs. When they start soldering the ram and hard drives to the motherboard they pissed me off. I understand why a closed architecture is good but they take it too far at times.
I know I will get the problem fixed. I just hate having to spend so much time getting it done.