Blessed by the Potato

I don’t usually find Red Meat very funny, but this week’s was actually pretty good.

My computer is acting all weird and broken again — not opening folders and the like. The weird thing is that it’s spread to firefox: I can’t open webpages properly when my folders go down. What’s really strange is that the task manager (what you get when you hit ctrl-alt-del in WinXP) says that of my 1 GB of physical memory, only 504 MB is being used. I’m wondering if maybe the memory is allocated to one of my RAM sticks, and as soon as I try to open something that spills onto the other, I get weird errors? I’m going to look for a memory testing program to see if that might be my problem, but I really doubt it is. After all, isn’t it faster to put different things on seperate RAM chips to take advantage of the dual-channels? (Especially with a hyperthreading processor). While I’m still going to check that, I think I somewhere have some stupid windows system file that got corrupted somehow, or perhaps a registry key… and I’ll probably never find it.

Oh, and Acrobat Reader’s been a big pain lately. Most of the time it works fine, but every now and then it decides to close as soon as it opens with no error message at all. Once it starts that, it’s stuck doing that until a system restart.

Stupid technology.