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alexpgpI was doing a spell-check a few minutes ago on my desktop when pop! the screen went blank. I cautiously hit Ctrl-S to save my work, looking at the hard disk LED on the machine's front panel to see if the "Save" keychord resulted in any activity. No joy.
Upon reboot, the display looked fine, but the file exhibited no sign of having been saved. To figure out whether the problem lay with the video card or elsewhere, I started pinging the desktop from my Linux box, onegin.
The problem reasserted itself again in the course of a spell-check, and onegin indicated that the machine stopped responding to ping requests pretty much immediately. I therefore conclude that the problem is a sudden catastrophic malfunction that is not local to the video card.
Moreover, upon bootup, the Windows desktop tells me that the OS has experienced an unexpected error. (I'll say!) The major upshot of the error is that the so-called "Active Desktop" (which merely displays a static picture for me) has been turned off. I click to restore the graphic.
I'm going to let gagarin sit for a bit and see if it spontaneously combusts, or something.
Cheers...
UPDATE (11:55): I'm thinking the culprit is Word, running the spell-checker, but cannot imagine why, as I run the thing all the time.
UPDATE (12:36): I've avoided starting Word, and all continues to be well with gagarin. Wracking my brain for possibly relevant information, I can recall that the crash did not occur in the same place in the file (that's usually a giveaway), there's no weird formatting or (any) graphics in the file, and that the only thing "different" about the file I was spell-checking is that it's password-protected.
UPDATE (12:57): No sooner had I posted the previous update than the ghost in the machine... quit yet again. I tried to start it again and boot the rarely-used Linux partition (to see if perhaps the problem is OS-independent), but all I got was a "kernel panic" message, which involves its own problems. Despite an inability to run Linux on gagarin, I am thinking that the only other time something like this happened was when the fan on ellroy (my old VAIO) quit, causing the CPU to overheat. I caught a flash of the CPU temperature during the reboot immediately after the most recent crash, and the figure was "80°C/172°C." Too bad I don't really know what that means. I've unearthed gagarin and blown out the CPU area with canned air.
UPDATE (13:19): I've found a freeware motherboard monitor (here) and set it up for gagarin's motherboard (Biostar M7VIF). It's reporting a CPU temperature of 67°C after several minutes of virus scanning. We'll go back to work and see what we shall see.
Upon reboot, the display looked fine, but the file exhibited no sign of having been saved. To figure out whether the problem lay with the video card or elsewhere, I started pinging the desktop from my Linux box, onegin.
The problem reasserted itself again in the course of a spell-check, and onegin indicated that the machine stopped responding to ping requests pretty much immediately. I therefore conclude that the problem is a sudden catastrophic malfunction that is not local to the video card.
Moreover, upon bootup, the Windows desktop tells me that the OS has experienced an unexpected error. (I'll say!) The major upshot of the error is that the so-called "Active Desktop" (which merely displays a static picture for me) has been turned off. I click to restore the graphic.
I'm going to let gagarin sit for a bit and see if it spontaneously combusts, or something.
Cheers...
UPDATE (11:55): I'm thinking the culprit is Word, running the spell-checker, but cannot imagine why, as I run the thing all the time.
UPDATE (12:36): I've avoided starting Word, and all continues to be well with gagarin. Wracking my brain for possibly relevant information, I can recall that the crash did not occur in the same place in the file (that's usually a giveaway), there's no weird formatting or (any) graphics in the file, and that the only thing "different" about the file I was spell-checking is that it's password-protected.
UPDATE (12:57): No sooner had I posted the previous update than the ghost in the machine... quit yet again. I tried to start it again and boot the rarely-used Linux partition (to see if perhaps the problem is OS-independent), but all I got was a "kernel panic" message, which involves its own problems. Despite an inability to run Linux on gagarin, I am thinking that the only other time something like this happened was when the fan on ellroy (my old VAIO) quit, causing the CPU to overheat. I caught a flash of the CPU temperature during the reboot immediately after the most recent crash, and the figure was "80°C/172°C." Too bad I don't really know what that means. I've unearthed gagarin and blown out the CPU area with canned air.
UPDATE (13:19): I've found a freeware motherboard monitor (here) and set it up for gagarin's motherboard (Biostar M7VIF). It's reporting a CPU temperature of 67°C after several minutes of virus scanning. We'll go back to work and see what we shall see.
