I was going to say, add a good quality surge protector to the outlet and see if it stopped booting.
Or even a UPS…charge it up and unplug it from the wall. True isolation.
-D/a
A very odd problem just came up: While writing a post on another forum, Firefox’s spellchecker didn’t recognize the word “combinations”. I looked at it and couldn’t find a typo, so I deleted the “s”, and sure enough, the dictionary recognized it. How very odd that the dictionary would know the singular but not the plural, particularly for such a common word.
On my Samsung netbook, the smartpad doesn’t work… but only when plugged in to the AC adapter…
United States-International
Yes, you’d think the spellchecker would handle not just the “base” word but different combinations of the word too.
Also, “vaginas.”
Perhaps no Firefox extension programmer has ever seem more than one.
If I leave my Kodak printer plugged in for more than 30 minutes, it slowly begins to cripple the computer, starting with killing my internet connection, then rendering other programs unrunable too, finally culminating in not letting me shut the computer down. After extensive searching via google I’ve only found 3 other people who report this problem. I’d love to know if they have the same model of computer too, not just the same printer.
There was a period of time where, every time I hit the “c” key, instead of typing the letter “c” the computer would open a program called “Catalyst Control Center”. Very irritating, since I could neither type anything serious down one letter and because I touch-type, so I would be distracted about 5 times every time I typed anything. Also, in the thread where I asked about the problem I kept having to say “Atalyst Ontrol Enter”. That was fun.
The problem was that I had, in cleaning out junk on my computer, uninstalled the Control Center, and apparently it didn’t take kindly to that. A system restore fixed the problem, although I still don’t know what the program actually does…
I’ve had a similar problem. Changing from US International fixed it.
It’s control software for a video card.
My current problem is this one which I have asked about on the Dope before. Still haven’t fixed it. The interesting thing is I have now figured out that the computer actually doesn’t crash randomly. It crashes every second time you boot. Dunno what that means.
I appreciate the ideas, and I’ll try them, but it might take me a while to get back - crunch time!
I have a Gateway NW78-series laptop, and the past 2 version of Ubuntu (11.04 and 11.10) have been unable to control the backlight. In order to see what’s going on, I’ve had to boot into Windows and edit a config file to basically tell it to use a generic driver. Oddly enough, I had no problem with this in 10.10 or earlier releases.
Perhaps this will help?
I’ve had that as well on my laptop running Kubuntu. I was trying to install a program that would enable me to use my nVidia Optimus card. Installed, rebooted, and everything was backwards. I had the feeling that I was looking out from behind the monitor. Thankfully an upgrade fixed that.
Maybe this happens to everyone, I don’t know: If I’m in Firefox and open a PDF in another tab, I can’t use the scroll wheel to scroll down my current tab. Nothing will happen in the current tab, but when I click back to the PDF’s tab, the PDF document will have moved with the scroll wheel.
Yep. Switched the keyboard layout and now it’s back to normal. And I’ve learned something so I guess today wasn’t a total loss.
Ooooh - just remembered another one - think I’ve told it here before as well.
We bought a secondhand computer from a co-worker. Brought it home, set it up, started using it - and it froze at random times either a few minutes after startup or sometimes DURING startup. The co-worker took it home and played around with it and it worked fine, never froze.
Several cycles of trying it, taking it back to his place, a new hard drive even… really really frustrating. We were beginning to think it didn’t like us, or our house had bad feng shui or something.
Finally it seemed to be behaving, we thought maybe it had something to do with the phone-line fakout we had (no phone outlet near the computer so we had a set of those things that make a phone jack using the house’s electric wiring). We disconnected that and the computer started working.
Then we decided we’d rather have it on the desk than on the floor underneath (it was a tower case).
INSTANT freezup.
So we put 2 and 2 together, and decided that the CRT monitor - which had begun not displaying colors all that correctly anyway - might be the culprit. Moved the computer back to the floor, it worked fine. We replaced the CRT with an LED, put the computer back on the desk, and it was perfectly fine.
So our feng shui theory wasn’t all that far off!
I use QuickKeys (formerly a CE Software product, was bought up by a company called “Startly” at some point). MacOS 10.4.11 (yeah, I know. I’m in luddite mode. Nothing in Leopard I want or need and it’s a PowerPC box so 10.6 or 10.7 aren’t even possibilities).
I never had problems with QK until a few months ago when it started going into perpetual-beachball mode for 4-5 minutes at at time; macros would fail to execute when I hit their shortcut keystroke combos; logouts and shutdowns would get stuck waiting for QK to close; etc.
Reinstalled the OS (archive and install) about 3 weeks ago for other reasons but assumed it would probably fix QK. Didn’t.
I have a dinosauric laptop that I got in 2003. It still starts up, under protest, but it’s not good for much. It was built with an outdated processor (celeron) and amount of RAM (half a gig), even for that period. After a couple years of use, I used to have to tilt the whole thing up and down to get the hard drive to “think.” It may have been a HDD overheating issue, but it never got hot enough to automatically shut down. Just hot enough not to think unless I rocked it… like a baby! 
I had an entire company website die during a simple code update to add a hyperlink. Somewhere in the javascript, a “ghost character” of some sort got inserted that borked the whole page and crashed the company browsers (back in the Netscape Communicator days).
A character-by-character comparison between the working roll-back version and the new version showed them identical. I had even encountered bad font typing or ghost characters before, and tried resaves in various fonts and filetypes (.doc to .txt to .htm back to .txt etc)
The only way we discovered the root of the problem was by accident when, in frustration, I printed a hard copy of the code ready to do a complete rewrite. Going through with a hiliter, I saw one of those funny little squares that you get when a printer doesn’t recognize a font character. It didn’t show up in any of the code onscreen in whatever format or font I converted it to.
I highlighted the offending line, deleted and retyped it, and everything worked
I once had single copy of a massive MSWord legal document worth tens of thousands of dollars of billable time which suddenly became unusable (I can’t remember in what way exactly). I could still see it and still copy/paste from it. If I created a new document and copy/pasted the old document into it, the new document was just as bad. I tried copying bits of the old document into a new document, and that worked. I gradually copied more and more of the old document into a new one until the new one failed. I eventually narrowed it down by a process of elimination until I figured out that the entire problem related to one paragraph mark. Deleted that, and everything was fine.