Borked
Posted on October 12, 2002 @ 11:03 in General
Well, I finally managed to bork up Win2k pretty badly.
Yesterday morning I was in a hurry and figured I'd quickly send an email with images attached to my work account so that I would have them there if I needed them. The images were in BMP format, so they were pretty big, the email program choked, I killed the process through the taskmanager, shut down the computer and went to work, figuring I'd deal with the images later.
When I got home, I turned on the computer, logged in and got a message that Windows had run out of virtual memory and asked me to enlarge the swapfile. Huh? This Win2k installation has been humming along for the best part of two years without complaints, so what's the matter? Well, what's the matter I don't know, I just know that Win2k will just completely eat whatever amount of swapfile you throw at it, whether it's 384, 512, 768 or even 1024 Megabytes. Apparently killing the email program caused so much undigestable clutter in the swapfile that Win2k can't deal with it anymore. Even disabling the swapfile, in the hope of clearing it out, doesn't help.
To Win2k's credit, I can still log in, copy files and run some minor programs that don't eat a lot of memory. For the moment I'm saved by the fact that this odd behavior is limited to my main user account on this box, so I created another user and I'm able to use my box pretty much as I should be able to, but I've of course lost all the personal settings that have gone into the system for over two years. Scrap that... the new user account fills up the swapfile just as badly after a while. Something really broke this time. That means I'm going to have to do a reinstall *sigh*mutter*grumble* unless someone who reads this has a solution and is kind enough to drop it in the comments :-)
Nice timing... with just one day left before the AoIR conference. Grr!
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