Lotus, Sound, and Life

Tripp Black's Blog

Windows Update Got Me Again

Tripp Black  May 9 2011 12:54:56 AM
My Windows PC is basically useless.

I had a good couple months w/o anything more than the once or twice at most reboot needed a week. I've skirted anything major somehow for the last year or so. That was until Wednesday morning when I found my machine had rebooted early Wednesday morning. Ever since, I have to wait 5-7 minutes for an application to actually start after double-clicking. Resource monitor shows a brief burst and then minimal activity over that 5 minutes or so. Then suddenly, each app just loads like normal - doesn't matter the app. Even the timeout logout/login screen takes about 5 minutes to come up and to then log me back in.

Quite a productivity killer.

So, to limp along I've left all my apps just running and I leave my little Mac up, for client calls and I needed something where I didn't have an app window already open. Some apps won't start. They give time-out errors. VMware client won't start. Photoshop won't start. Lotus Notes Standard Client and the Admin client starts. Designer won't start.

I should have thought about that Tuesday/Wednesday morning update, but it's been a while since a Redmond hangover bit me this hard.

Sure enough, the event logs showed an illuminating event message. After the standard messages of apps hard stopping/crashing when Windows Update force rebooted, with the other startup messages is a little message that says something like "Windows has determined that you have an incompatibility with your system firmware, and has disabled certain performance processor features. Visit your PC vendor to get updated BIOS firmware." I'd give you the exact message but it would take over 30 minutes for me to boot the PC and wait for my 5-7 tray icons to load (each taking 5 minutes) and another 5 to wait for Event Viewer to load.

I checked my motherboard maker. The board is about 3 years old, so they don't have newer firmware than beginning of 2010. My motherboard and processor may only be 2.4 Ghz duel-core processor, but it was a very nice motherboard and processor when new. It's still fast enough, well until Wednesday it was.

I tried my Ubuntu live CD and my machine loads Ubuntu apps just fine. Figures. So it's not a hardware issue. I was lucky to run Windows 7 for a year without having to reinstall. Most people I know w/7 had had multiple reinstalls. The difference is that I know better. With everything else going on right now, I just need a machine that "just works". I definitely don't have a 3-4 days to rebuild by Windows 7, apply patches, and all my apps again.

I'm only running Windows as at all, because I have to do so for Lotus Designer. They don't have an Ubuntu/Linux or Mac version.

I really have only two choices, install XP SP3 back on the machine, or go spend more money a new MB. I'd do the first option and just wait another year or two, except that I'm not sure if Lotus 9 will be supported on XP SP3. I'm thinking they will. IBM is great in this aspect. However, for the next few days though, I'll just leave the PC off and wish I'd turned off Windows Update in time . . .