OS half life
Posted in daily
Tags :My operating system is playing up on me today. They are days like that, when little things go wrong, apps quit, settings disappear - one feels a little out-of-sync, ones OS a little unreliable, unstable - and one doesn't really know why.
It reminds me of a paper I read on Dr Dobbs last year entitled "What scruft is". Unfortunately, I can't find it anymore .. Basically, scruft is what accumulates over time in your computer, slowing it down, making it less reliable and unstable, until you break down and perform a complete OS reinstall.
Mark from diveintomark.org experienced just that this summer, and posted a paper on "How to reinstall XP in 5 hours or less".
Instructive.
Comments and responses
16 Sep 2003
Perhaps you almost just ran out of memory, including harddisk storage at some time. That is the only time when I loose settings and the system is acting up like you describe. I have a G3 server running for a 120 days or thereabouts, and after I tried to install SETI at home, it wrote an endless amount of cr.. in the system log. I almost had to reboot, but caught it at less than a megabyte free on the harddisk. Oh, well, the ssh-key broke, but that’s life ;-)