BiggAndyy

The KSOD has now morphed into the HSOD (Hang Screen of Death).  Similar symptoms except the hang comes while the desktop is still visible on the screen.  The mouse moves but the buttons don’t work, nor does the keyboard.

To get the machine past the KSOD (see previous post) I allowed Vista to restore from a restore point.  Now this is different.  The machine works for a few minutes then just hangs.  Repeatedly and reliably.  I am all for computers (especially Windows) being reliable, but not this type of reliable.

Spinrite 6.0 found a few unrecoverable sections of the hard drive but nowhere near the boot sector or MBR.  But since it is good to have as clean a drivespace as possible, I ran the fix and locked those sectors out.  Still hangs.

Asked Mr. Google for some advice and found *gasp* MICROSOFT social technet had some good suggestions!  Seems to be two big culprits in this mystery, the WLAN service and NVidia drivers.  Well, since the WLAN NEEDS to be on (this is a notebook), I tried disabling the service.  Still hangs.

Seems our winner of the Vista Fail Award today is NVidia!  Downloaded new drivers, installed them, and so far no more hangs.

However (and this may be a preview of an upcoming Vista Fail) I just ran the Updates and Vista seems to be KSODding again… I think I’ll start selling little clay figurines on eBay to make a living.

The blacK Screen Of Death.  Well, the black screen of waiting to see if it eventually boots.

It won’t.

And I tried ALL the poindexter solutions on the web.  Hitting the left shift key about a bazillion times.  Using BART-PE and renaming the event log folder.  Spinrite’d the entire hard drive.  Let Vista try to autofix the problem.

None of them worked.  Except one.

Let Vista go back and restore from a backup that at one time worked (assuming you are allowing Vista to do that).

That is the only reliable fix I have found for Vista’s KSOD.  YMMV.

OWA – Outlook Web Access.

My machine was updated from Windows XP64 to Windows 7 64.  Well, by updated I mean Windows reinstalled itself since there is no clear upgrade path from XP64 to 7 (except using the FAST wizard).  But that only saves profile information, NOT the programs themselves.

So I am sitting with a nice, clean Windows 7 installation and no Outlook until I can get hold of the Office 10 DVDs.  (RABBIT CHASING TIME: I can remember when Windows came on 4 3.5 inch diskettes and now it is an entire DVD??? anyway…)

I am logging into OWA to get my mail and I am eminently annoyed that I must relogin every ten minutes or so.  Until I realize I am logging is as a PUBLIC computer.  The autologoff feature for OWA is 10 minutes.  If I select PRIVATE computer I can stay logged in for 6 hours.

Just passing this along… it’s easy to forget.

After speaking with some other folks in the know they have steered me to the correct solution (or so it seems at this point).

All the big to do is about Java and NOT having it updated.  Older versions of Java on Windows boxes lead to all types of troubles, and the Find-Quick-Results is no exception.  In fact, it’s the primary vehicle of distribution.

And it’s not the websites you visit that is delivering the corrupted code, it is the ubiquitous ads on most webpages that is doing the harm.  The ads themselves have the compromised code injected into them (either knowingly or unknowingly), and when we visit websites that are normally and sometimes conscientiously monitored for malware, it can still get through because the ad in the rotation at the time (whether delivered by Google or some other ad provider) is infected.

So, visit java.com and get the latest updates to your Java addons and see if that makes the difference for you as well.  Don’t forget to clean your system too, no telling what has been injected into it by rogue ads.