Digital Life

The first episode of many, I imagine.

The reason why I haven't been around much, or at all, the fast few days is that I've been getting visited by the Blue Reaper. My system was so unstable for a time that I had to turn it off as a preventative measure. Ah, technology.

So, I did what little investigating I could on my phone and quickly discovered that whatever was causing it was beyond my depth. Fortunately, my best friend is a master of this sort of thing. Over the course of a few hours, we used a remote connection to narrow down, if not outright solve the problem.

So, these are the three possible problems we came up with:
Memory problems (I've had this one before when one of my RAM sticks died and was replaced)
Malware (unlikely but never say never)
Microsoft Security Essentials (which is where a lot of the errors that resulted in the crashes originated from)

Ran the built in memory test and a chkdsk, didn't come up with anything so that mostly rules out memory issues.

When I was doing my own diagnostics I updated my NIC driver, uninstalled and reinstalled MSE and Firefox, since the latter was having major stability issues. Did some basic scanning for malware, updating my malware protection, etc. That pretty much narrows that field down pretty quick. I highly doubt it's malware, especially since I noticed MSE seemed to not be running properly for a bit, so in my mind that's the most likely culprit.

I ended up reinstalling MSE a second time last night and running a scan. Nothing came up and so the computer is running normally, pretty much. Of course, I'm still paranoid about it blue screening again. But for now the issues appears to have been resolved. Yay that. If MSE continues to have problems I will simply replace it with something else. Before MSE I was using Avira, and I've used multiple other antivirus services over the years, coupled with a firewall and a few other measures.