blue screen continues

Just a quick update while I am still functional today. Any and every session of late has ended in a blue screen of death or in other words a hard crash. Sometimes it will come back up after a hard reset sometimes it will just beep at me. I understand that the beeps are the HP way of diagnostics but I don't know what it is telling me yet so I don't know which way to turn.

I started it up again this morning and got the usual Windows closed in an unusual manner last time do you want to open up in safe mode or regular? I selected regular and it opened fine, or so it appears. It always realigns my icons on the desktop after one of these episodes.

Since it has opened I started running every diagnostics test on it I could find. HP has this box loaded with what looks like pretty goods ones in hardware diagnostics so that is what I have been doing for the last three and a half hours. I even ran the heavy stress tests on it and just like before everything is showing as fine. Previously I have run all the updates and virus and spyware scans and came up with nothing and so I am running out of ideas. I am afraid I am going to have to pull the big plug and reload all software from scratch. There is a system recovery app loaded but I am not sure what that does completely so before I do anything I will once again check in with the Concierge service from Costco and get further guidance.

There are too many other things going on in life to be shut down like this. It really sucks up a lot of time trying to do the diagnostics and run the test and all the while you are not checking your e-mail, news or blogs, not to mention the yard work, housework, car work and errands that aren't getting done.

Now if all the hardware testing is showing that the box is functioning properly then that leads me to think this is a software problem. I have never had a perfect running system but it has always worked enough that I learned to live with it. We paid the extra to get the on board TV tuner and Windows Media Center that I have never quite been able to get to work the way I imagined it would. Record your favorite shows, I never have. Watch all the new digital channels that are available, I get two channels o.k. but the program freezes as I try to change channels past the one in the middle. Also, if I have had Windows Media Player open and it hasn't closed correctly (which it never does) Windows Media Center will not play until I open up the Task Manager and kill Windows Media Player manually or reboot the computer. These are the type of workarounds that I have had to come up with that never should be but what we learn to accept when living in a Microsoft world. Maybe those Apple computer adds are based on something more than rumor.

I am currently using the Firefox browser to enter this as the update to Internet Explorer 8 did not go well and while I do not blame it for the problems I am having (since the blue screen problems started before the IE8 update) I still half wonder if there might be a connection to IE and the blue screen anyway. Will trial and error always be the case with computers? I think that is a given in my lifetime.

Well at least while I am functional, maybe I can get those photos sent out to family that I promised. They probably think me a heel for neglecting them this long.

Until the next blue screen appears, I will let you in on one more secret. It is very difficult to type with all your fingers crossed.

This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.