Alright
That's dealing them as well as taking them.
It's the new getting drunk and swearing at Elton John, apparently.
"He's actually not such a total cunt when you get to know him," she probably never said.
Not Alright
Unless it's done by her.
Thanks Lily Allen!
I'm talking about the kinds of problems that linger for so long you come to a point where you almost accept that you're just going to have to live with them, such is the apparent paucity of information or even recognition of the issue in the wider tech world.
The Not-So-Random CPU Spikes
Firstly, it was our old friend, random CPU spikes. Previously, the problems I'd had in this area had eventually - reluctantly - caused me to do a clean install in order to sort the swines - there really didn't seem to be any obvious cause or solution in that instance.
Best I could figure, it was some remnant from a virus that hadn't entirely been dealt with previously.
Those CPU spikes genuinely were random though - you'd never know when they were going to hit, making for watching any video file a haphazard experience at best.
The more recent issue though seemed much more regimented, and - whilst still hugely irritating - much less frequent. They would always occur at least once when watching anything, which, while less of an issue than what I'd experienced before, still had the effect of taking you out of the story or whatever, particularly when you knew it was going to occur at some point.
Process Explorer indicated that these spikes were caused by some aspect of explorer.exe or simply 'System', which was little help as there are any number of sub-processes under those umbrellas.
Eventually - without actually timing it - I worked out that they seemed to occur about once every half hour, but I still couldn't find any cause for it. If I had timed it, I would have discovered that they occurred exactly every half-hour, on the hour and half-hour - because it was my ruddy background wallpaper changing over that was doing it.
The only reason I know this, is because I happened to have Process Explorer open (and not maximized) at the exact moment the picture changed. If not for that particular combination of events, I'd probably still be putting up with it now, like some Tourette's suffer that's resigned to the fact that at some point he will shout, "Bollocks," in the supermarket.
You see, I'm using Windows 7, and I'd gotten sick of looking at that stupid fish on my desktop, so I decided I wanted a change. For some reason, I decided I'd quite like a dynamic wallpaper, i.e. a background that changes periodically. I didn't even know if such things existed, and a cursory web search suggested that they weren't too prevalent. Out of interest, I decided to see what Win 7 has in terms of alternatives, and what do you know? It only has some dynamic wallpapers pre-loaded.
I went for the views of Britain selection, being a patriotic sort... (not really, in fact the images were a bit too chocolate box-y for my liking to be honest), and every half-hour I was treated to another view from this fair isle.
If I'd known that each one would be accompanied by a ludicrous power draining changeover, they could keep it. In fact, as soon as I realised what was going on, that fish was immediately back swimming behind my desktop icons.
Anyway, that's the long and rather dull story of how I sorted some CPU spikes. Perhaps you've been tearing your hair out wondering what the chuff might be causing your computer-based viewing to be so rudely interrupted approximately twice an hour, every hour. Well, perhaps this post may have just enlightened you.
I don't know if any other dynamic backgrounds cause this, but I suspect they probably would, although I'm not really sure why it would provoke such a system fit just to change a flipping picture.
Giving Windows Search Index the Finger
My most recent success involves the curious case of the search index that wouldn't rebuild.
For reasons I can't even remember properly, having started this so long ago, I decided to rebuild the search index on my computer. I think I actually changed some of the indexing options, which caused it to rebuild the entire thing from scratch.
I'd heard it could take a while, but I was prepared to wait. I didn't quite expect to still be waiting for it to finish about two months later.
Initially it seemed fine, but whenever it got to a certain number of files indexed, approximately 16,000, my whole system seemed to seize up. On an on it went, chugging away, monopolizing my computer's poor CPU, managing to index about 1 file every hour - if it moved at all. Eventually I just turned it off altogether, because the constant whirring of my CPU fan threatened to drive me insane.
I occasionally let it work overnight to see if would get anywhere. It never did. SearchFilterHost.exe and its hogging of CPU cycles became a regular fixture in Task Manager.
After looking around the Web, I noticed some people with a similar issue found that if they uninstalled certain audio/video decoders, that seemed to do the trick. Indeed, Process Explorer seemed to indicate that these kind of files were in use when the indexing process ground to a halt, even when no media was being played.
I immediately uninstalled the K-Lite Codec Pack, and a conversion program called SUPER and restarted my computer. And guess what? Yes, it exploded. Not really, it of course started indexing normally (and, mercifully, silently) as it should.
So the upshot? Windows Search Indexing chokes on splitter files, in other words anything with an .ax extension. If you have any of these on your system, get rid of them, at least temporarily, if you want your indexing to go smoothly. Just prepare for a certain amount of chokage when you eventually put them back on.
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