Since the debacle of the virus last month and my XP now officially regarded as ‘not genuine’ I have been experiencing certain odd behaviours with this mess of an operating system.

I have been turning the PC off each night and restarting each evening. For the last couple of days I have noticed that when I initially boot-up and everything has started, I might be able to open or close a couple of windows but after a few seconds the PC becomes unusable. The mouse moves around but double clicking does nothing. Can’t get to Task Manager. Nothing works. Do a hard reboot (ouch) and the second startup works ok. This has happened for the last two days.

If this is as a result of the Windows Genuine Advantage update that a lot of people downloaded in July there could be hell to pay.

Are we headed for a Web 2 melt-down, sort of dot com crash version 2. Yahoo bought Flickr for millions and has no idea how to make any money from it. Youtube pay huge amounts for bandwidth but generate squat. MySpace gets massive amounts of publicity but is prone to lurkers. Just this morning listening to one of Leo Laporte’s podcasts I heard that the writer Jerry Pournell has a Myspace account and uses the identity of a 13 year old girl just to see what happens. Turns out he is contacted a lot. Sounds unsavoury to me.

The internet is great but lord knows what kids get to see. Fire up Google, enter the wrong word and you are one click away from some pretty awful sites.

Quote of the day

‘I went into a McDonald’s yesterday and said ‘I’d like some fries’. The girl at the counter said ‘Would you like some fries with that”. Jay Leno (1950-)

Tried to freshen up the pc with an XP ‘disc’ but Microsoft are too canny and soon notice its not really XP but something imitating it.

So I end up with a MS ‘not a genuine Windows’ message. Oops. Does this mean I will not get any updates. Am I to be nagged. I suppose it was to be expected and this is what happens when you are in the land of the bluescreeny. Before I even consider doing some genuining lets make sure the system is stable by running Call Of Duty 2, downloading 6 movies via Bittorrent, retrieving all of my subscribed 50 odd newsgroups headers, run a virus check, installing office 2003 and generating 50 million records in Excel via a VB macro. Simultaneously. If that doesn’t generate a blue screen I think I’m safe.

Quote of the day:

‘It takes only one drink to get me drunk. The trouble is I can’t remember if it’s the thirteenth or the fourteenth’ George Burns (1896-1996)