Salocin

PC Crash for 2003

Once a year I suffer a complete system failure, and my computer goes totally bonkers. Last year it was the hard disk that gave me the terrible UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME error, this year it's something a little more confusing, but nonetheless a pain in the posterior for a day or two...

Last year, it hit me in the middle of October. First year finals week. Now that I'm in the second year of Wharton, finals week is in early December. So guess when my computer decided to go on a mental vacation?

Anyway. It was one of those strange and unexplainable problems, where everything gradually begins to not work. First it's the HotSync program giving port errors, then it's the network connections crashing their respective services, then it's the Infrared port giving me lots of errors despite the fact that there isn't an infrared beam for a hundred miles. Soon enough you're spending more time closing error windows than doing any work, and you can't get the applications with which you work to start anyway, so before your CD writer joins the picket line, you copy everything you can think of onto a couple of CDs and hit the IBM factory reset option at bootup.

You'd think that would solve the problem, but you're really just exchanging a large but uncertain amount of pain for a large but completely certain amount of pain. 8 hours later, I was beginning to get my system operational again, had reinstalled XP and Office and the Printer and Verizon and the option pricing software and Crystal Ball and so on. Then I connect to the internet to download my school's version of Symantec antivirus, ZoneAlarm and the Windows Updates, but within 5 minutes of connecting, a virus (Worm_Agobot.R) slips in on port 135, installs itself and starts selectively shutting down processes and screwing with the newly installed Symantec anti-virus program (it shuts it down at 15 second intervals so it never gets a chance to detect it).

So a long protracted fight begins between me and the virus as I load regedit, try to track down the key that's loading it at startup, but keep getting regedit shut down on me every 15 seconds. It's a slow process. It takes an hour and a half. The long and short of it is, if your anti-virus spontaneously and randomly shuts down and you're having problems with the system shutting itself down periodically (NT/ADMINISTRATOR) because SVCHOST has crashed, or the RPC (Remote Procedure Call) has been shut down, then check your task list for svchos1 because that's the blighter right there. He's a pain to get rid of too.

Anyway - finally re-installed, having to go through all of those annoying first-time ZoneAlarm connection messages (MAD.exe, the Motive Chorus Daemon, for example - a benign information servlet that sends data on my connection back to the Verizon helpdesk, but has a name that proves programmers still play DnD) and on the bright side, my sleepless night has provided me with a computer that now runs twice as fast as it used to. For the next 3 days at least, I'm installing the 41 (!) XP patches as we speak (so to speak).