Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Sometimes you don't realize how good you have it until something happens to make you aware of it.

Monday night I was in the middle of finishing an assignment when my computer started acting funny: lagging terribly and spontaneously restarting. The Gryphon was visiting, so I had him look at it after I was done work. He didn't find anything obvious. He caught a virus with the virus check, and we hoped for the best.

But the next day, it was not only randomly restarting but also began to lag so terribly it was as if my computer was in slow motion. I asked The Gryphon to come over after work, before I started my evening assignments, and see if he could figure out what was going on.

This time he did a more thorough investigation, starting with what processes were running and how much space they took up. He discovered something odd: there were two processes running with the same name, CSRSS, and one of them was huge!

So he did a little investigation into it, comparing it to what was running on his own laptop, also running Windows 2000. He discovered that the second copy of this program, the huge one, had only been created the night before. So he dumped those files in the trash, and we hoped for the best.

Sure enough, my computer began acting normal. Now, it's probably a virus but if it is there's no updated definition for it yet, because Norton didn't catch it even when we updated the definitions. But The Gryphon says we should keep updating them and Norton should soon catch up.

Later last night, at about the same time it happened the first night, the same thing started. I let The Gryphon take over again. He discovered another copy of those files had appeared in the same place as before. He deleted them again and this time gave me step-by-step instructions for dealing with it, should it happen again tonight.

Hopefully, Norton will catch up to this soon. In the meantime, at least I'm functional.

The computer really is a big part of my day. I couldn't do my work assignments without it, but I also use it for a creative outlet (Wild Violet), for social contact (IM-ing The Gryphon at work, e-mailing friends and family) and for fun (playing The Sims).

So when there are problems with it, I realize how much I rely on it. I also realize how lucky I am to be dating an IM expert. While I didn't start dating him because he could fix my computer, as I told him last night, it's a really nice perk.

"I should put you on retainer," I joked.

"You already have."

"Oh, really? What's the payment?" I asked.

"Hugs and kisses."

Easily done.

Copyright 2004 by Alyce Wilson

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