Broken computer

Since my PC has been crashing quite a bit lately, I decided to reinstall Vista. Before reinstalling Vista I decided to first do a backup of my photos (they're not on the same drive as Vista, but I needed to do a backup of them anyway). While the backup was running I cleaned the sink in the en-suite to my bedroom, then played on Mario Galaxy 2 with Mauser and L for a bit.

Eventually the backup finished, but Vista crashed the same way it did the other times. After waiting a while to check it really had crashed and wasn't just being slow, I did a hard reset, and backed up all my other files.

After this I formatted the partition and reinstalled Vista. When the install was finished I installed the Wifi drivers, then started Windows Update, which had 107 important updates to install.

Downloading and installing the updates took the rest of the morning, and while I waited I watched "The man with the movie camera", which was quite interesting to see what life was like in 1928 post revolutionary but pre war Russia - quite normal really.

Windows got stuck on a 'shutting down' screen for about an hour after installing the updates, so I had to do a hard reset. After doing a disk check, the new install of Vista started, but there was no internet access. In the Control Panel, when I tried to access the 'Network and Sharing Center', it said some like "This page cannot be found".

I tried a few other things, but couldn't get the internet working, so I formatted the partition and reinstalled Vista again. This time I didn't install any updates, so I at least now have internet access. With Vista being so broken for me lately, I decided that I would buy Windows 7, even though it does cost about £150.

Then in the evening I accidentally suspended/hibernated instead of shutting down. When I switched the computer back on, the Desktop size was messed up. So I right clicked on the Desktop, then everything became unresponsive, similar to the problem I'd been having before reinstalling Vista. It was slightly different though in that the Desktop was overlaid with a white translucent mask (like a normal program gets when it is unresponsive/has crashed). And I didn't get the "Logon process has failed to create the security options dialog" error message either.

So it may be a hardware problem that is causing Vista to crash, or it may just be that hibernating my computer doesn't work properly (I've never used hibernate before). Anyway, when I get Windows 7 if that crashes in the same way I'll know if its likely a hardware problem or not. I'm making sure to buy the full version of Windows 7 (not OEM) so I can install it on a new PC if I get/build one.

In the afternoon I watched 'Fantastic Mr Fox' with Mauser and Bo. In the evening I played on Mario Galaxy 2 a bit more with Mauser and Bo, then scanned some pogs in on Mauser's PC.