James had to work today (going in a lot earlier than I though he had to), so I took the opportunity—or rather my body did—to catch up on the sleep I lost at Atomicon. When I arose the rain had already begun, so I decided to catch up on a few things at home.

One was simple: to rip some songs to my Droid playlist. I had already ripped all the Rupert Holmes music I had, but had recently accumulated more with my purchase of "Cast of Characters: the Rupert Holmes Songbook." Windows Media Player does that in a trice. I change a couple of names, and it's ready to go.

The next just took time: dub the remaining four McBride movies from the DVR onto DVD. I had a bad minute or two when it got very dark and began to thunder, but it blew over without hitting the power. I had previously recorded all of these, but Hallmark Movie Channel is showing them in HD, so I am redoing them. I wish they didn't bleep the swear words. It seems a little silly; it's not like this is the Family Channel! Thank God I can skip the commercials, which, in the middle of the night when these have been showing, are deadly: ambulance-chasing lawyer commercials, vitamin crap, bits for Medicare and hearing aids (the latter with Lee Majors doing the commercials), and those "Seen on TV" gadgets from cat scratching implements to the divided brownie pan. Yawn. The films have some ripples and skips in them (it seems standard with the DVR recordings), and I missed my cues several times, but they're 99.5 percent intact and it will be done with. Maybe someday there will be a DVD set with no blips and no edits.

The third chore took longer and was more frustrating: I have been having a problem with my computer since we turned the clocks ahead. I went to time.gov to get the proper time and it said I needed a new version of Java. So I went to Sun's site for the upgrade. Since then my computer freezes up at least once a day, usually about an hour after I start it up, but anywhere between five minutes and two hours. I have to wait a set number of minutes to restart it; too soon and the bootup process screws up. And it's not from overheating: the computer is not only not overly warm when it happens (before James replaced the power supply, it was shutting off from overheating, and believe me, it was HOT), but once I restart it, it stays on for the rest of the day, up to 12, 13, 14 hours. When it locks up the keyboard and mouse no longer respond; if I am in Citrix working, the work applications keep working for five to ten minutes afterwards, and then also lock up.

I have scanned it with my virus scanner, also with AdAware, and all my Windows updates were up to date. I even went back to do a system restore from before I installed the Java update and deleted that Java update. It seems to happen when the computer is still, but it's also happened in the middle of switching messages in Eudora, surfing in Firefox, even copying a file of a USB drive.

Today I went to the Windows OneCare Live site for a scan. This helped me when Conficker got onto both my laptop and desktop. I ran the scan, and lo and behold, it found something. I didn't catch what it was the first time round, had to abort the re-scan when the thunderstorm came up, but finally got it on the third try: and guess what, it was something that had to do with Java. OneCare said it couldn't fix it, but that I should remove a certain file in the Java subdirectory. I have, and it doesn't show up on the scan anymore.

Whether it worked, I don't know. I'll have to see. But at least it's not on there anymore. The computer itself got several shocks during the winter from static carried when I tried to plug in USB sticks or the work printer. It may be internal.

[Later: no, didn't fix the lockup thing.]

Labels: computers, music, television

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 4:24:00 PM

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