Tuesday, November 30, 2004

Gorillas and the Blue Screen of Death

There has been an overriding theme to my week:

ARRG.

So much, in fact, that I should get a T-Shirt.
Too bad my particular Screen of Death doesn't have a shirt of it's own.

And that's *on top of* blogger refusing to let me log in for over a damn week.

*sigh*

I've given a name to my pain, and it is Batma- er, rather, What The Frell Is Up With Mike's Dell. It's frustrating enough to have have given it a really long name, Spanish nobility Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez,
Chief Metallurgist to King Charles the Fifth of Spain style, with capitalization and everything. 8 ( The Blue Screen of Death is becoming an increasingly frequent event, and windows take forever to open! "My Computer" opens five minutes after I click. ARRGH.
So I started doing some research, about the processes running in the Task Manager, thinking maybe spyware was responsible. Ctrl-Alt-Del should NOT be so freakin familiar, dammit. I can't remember the last time I had to force-quit something on a Mac! *ahem*

Anyway, It turns out that (as far as I'm concerned, anyway) it's WORSE than spyware - there are all sorts of legitimate-yet-nasty things that run at startup.
This page has been insanely helpful:

http://answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm

Apparently, Creative SoundBlaster and in fact all Creative software, drivers, etc, that are installed with the Creative soundcard and run the processes
Devldr.exe, Devldr16.exe, or Devldr32.exe, cause so many problems that, well, it seems best to simply uninstall them. Here's an excerpt from that oh-so-helpful page:

Found on Windows 2000/XP. It really does not matter how Creative call this task/service, DEVLDR, DEVLDR16, or DEVLDR32, it is a thorough nightmare whatever its name, and DEVLDR does not disappoint. What does this task do – we do not know, it is such a frustrating task we care little about what it does.

And even further:
As one website puts it "Rumours that Creative's driver team is composed entirely of gorillas enthusiastically beating on their keyboards with their feet have not been confirmed !".

So that's what I'm in the process of doing. I have to scour the C: drive for any Creative or evil "Devldr" stuff, restart, and install windows-default soundcard drivers and software. In short: ARRGH.

In Other News, I have an idea about Xmas gifts that are brought to you by the # 400 and the letter S.

3 comments:

Linden said...

Woah. That is crazyness. Evil evil, windows crazyness. I'm having evil windows crazyness too (though that website helped Jim figure out some stuff), when I updated to SP2 (EVIL!) my cd burner/ dvd reader stopped working. (!) Plus, whenever I tell it to shut off or restart, it takes like 10 minutes (or maybe it just hangs, I'm too impatient to find out) to actually shut off.
On a side note, those t-shirts: so cute!
Sorry about the Blogger.com messyness. =(
Oh, and I need to know about the # 400 and the letter 'S', because thats just intriguing. Gorillas?

Rachel said...

Whee, I am helpful! In the fight against windows insanity, even! That gives me a crazy happy glow. 8¬D

Blogger's messyness is not YOUR fault, silly Linden. ^_^

Heh. The gorillas are theoretically the ones enthusiastically banging on their keyboards at Creative, and programming bluescreenofdeath-causeing soundcard drivers & etc.

Rachel said...

I think I explained the 400/letter S thing in email. Just trying not to be obvious in the event of family ppls, like, actually reading this. ; )