Technical Content Ahead

 I know, right?  It's so rare I need to post a warning.  

Yes, you can laugh.  But then we'll take this off the beaten path, and right down into the clobbered idiot road.

That'd be me.  

Now, as much as I would love to have some sort of faster-than-light-speed computer (yes, I know that science has not yet managed to agree that might be possible, but I'm not much of one for limits - and since light cannot escape black holes, obviously there are other capabilities and possibilities we're not aware of just yet.  Bear with me), I've got a bit of a ... crate.  Now, to be fair, I spent the whopping $40 on this machine a couple of years ago, and it was a bit of an upgrade beyond the previous one.  I mean, this one has 4 gigs of RAM.  Yes, that was an upgrade.  

And beyond that, it's still Windows 7.  It runs, it runs ok most of the time, but then late yesterday, I noticed a few problems.  The biggest was that, as it occasionally happens, one of the tasks that gets spun up with my anti-virus software had gone from a relatively well-behaved 25,000K of RAM to a rather disturbing over 1,500,000K - or what us old folks like to call "piggy".

I'll spare the normally obligatory thing I do here when I detail my first computer as a VIC-20 with 5K of RAM, the first IBM PC my family bought which had the Hercules Graphics card that added enough memory to do pictures, er, graphs, in Lotus, and the mini-mainframe I shared with about 2500 other students in college that boasted the then-unheard of 24 MEGS of RAM - yes, I am old.  

But I certainly do not think that any sort of monitoring/policing system on a modern computer should require a whopping gig and a half of RAM.  I mean, the freaking operating system boots up and eats up nearly 3/4 of a Gig.  Yeah, I know, look at everything it can do.  As I once rather ignomiously said - er, well, I thought it was particularly observant and bright, but I have since seen ... er, the light - any operating system that throws in a thousand year calendar might have other hidden problems.  That was said about a particular bent of UNIX at the time (SCO Unix, lo these ... wow - 30 years ago).  

But as I worked with UNIX, I came to really enjoy it.  It fed my "I like to automate" need, and I started rolling my own scripts.  Yes, I started writing DOS Batch files, moved to composing Digital VMS "Command" files (the extension was, ironically, COM), and back to Batch, then ... yeah.  It's how I got the nickname BAT.Man - note the period.  Without that, let's face it, they don't make carbon fiber armor in my size.  

Anyway - to the problem - about every four or five months, the virus scanner eats memory like peanuts, and I end up having to reboot.  I'm pretty proud of the fact that I can usually, if the power cooperates, keep the computer up for months at a time.  So yeah, I do.  I like to be able to sit down, log in, and do things without spending fifteen minutes for everything to boot up.  So yes, by "log in" I do mean "clear out the screen saver".  

And so, as I had a wee bit of warning, I was able to save the open documents I had (there were a dozen or so - yes, I do have ADD, and am often distracted, what's your excuse?), and politely do just about everything right - before the computer went to lunch.  So I had to, as one often does have to, use the single-finger salute to restart the machine.  I am fortunate in that it did not require a power disconnect, just holding the power button in.  And then the computer came back up.  And I fired up the Task Manager, as I always do, to monitor and kill off the things that start up that I don't need, such as the printer control software for the two old printers I haven't yet uninstalled, or the multiple tasks that fire off for whatever reason for Windows Media player, or other tasks I know I don't want.  

But then I watched Services.exe start eating RAM like it was a virus scanner.  So that was ... scary.  It consumed 3.5 gigs of RAM before I gave up and re-fingered the button.  And it did it a little slower the second time, but I wasn't able to do much.  

Fortunately, being a geek in hiding has some benefits.  That and the 21st Century.  Because then I pulled out my cell phone, turned on the wifi (no, I don't leave it on because I don't always need the internet on my phone.  It's a phone), and did the Google trick with the words "Windows 7 Services.EXE Memory" and Google filled in "leak huge expansion".  

And, as I saw earlier this week, wahlah.  Which is Slightly Less Smart 'Merikan for "viola" (which is not an instrument, should you be slightly above what seems to be the latest "average").  It turns out there's a known issue - that is, known since 2011 known - that sometimes, Services.exe can get a little porky at the memory table when certain log files become ... well, let's just say if certain log files tucked away deep in your operating system get a little less organized than they're normally expecting, this is often termed "corruption" - and no, we're not talking garden-variety Donald Trump-style corruption, we're talking "a few bits misbehave" and not "the whole damned thing is rotten to the core".  As it, you know, were, allegedly, he said, trying not to barf up his sleeve.

So, after all the asides here, the issue was my computer did reboot but couldn't run anything else because Services.EXE was trying to read a corrupted log file.  And yes, I know very well the neighborhood of Windows\System32.  I spend a fair amount of time doing the hard block thing by entering certain web sites I do not wish to access my computer by adding their web address into the drivers\etc\hosts file.  That is, I enter things like

        127.0.0.1        WWW.DonaldJTrump.com    # trash block

That file is a little bit like a roll-your-own-DNS tool.  In this particular case, if I were to attempt to go to that toilet, I wouldn't get there.  The address 127.0.0.1 is ... well, it's called "home".  It's actually an address on your computer - a sort of dead end.  Back in the ... well, early days of the web, that is, back when Netscape was cool, most browser versions were under 3, and ... well, yeah, you were lucky to have one computer connected to the internet via dialup at your house, that little trick above could shut down traffic that had somehow wormed it's way in from some place you didn't know where, how, or want it to send your bank account number back to it's master.

So anyway, to get back to my long-forgotten point, it appeared I was going to have to figure out how to rebuild or otherwise recover a corrupted log file.  Except as I learned years ago, there are many things one can do to technology to fix it, but sometimes, the critical thing to do is not a damned thing.  That is, tincture of time.  Just wait and see what happens.  

As this wasn't rising floodwaters, but rather, something that was already broken, it couldn't break anything else (I saw to that by guaranteeing no internet interference by --- that's right, folks, I unplugged the yellow cable that goes from my computer to my hub, which runs up through two more hubs to get to my firewall, which sits just this side of the cable modem that gets me out on the internet - yes, I've just given you the entire technical layout of my network.  But good luck getting in).  As the damage had been done, I did what I do best - I went to bed and went to sleep.  And did not sleep all that well or all that deeply, but I slept for a good five hours.  

And this morning, when I walked up to this thing with my tablet, my phone, and my fingers crossed, it turned out Windows had indeed decided it would eliminate the problem file, and build a new one.  So things are fixed.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind a new computer, but I have other problems.  I got bills to pay, I got things to fix, and I got people to pay.  So no, I'm not going to blow any money on shiny new technology.  The last three years budget of technology around here went for a new printer.  So that's done.  

But at least things work.  And I was once again reminded that one does not always need to Do Something in order for things to get fixed.