Personal Dork Assistant

My PC began randomly freezing

My PC began randomly freezing up recently. Tried to isolate the cause, but with the pirated OS, the old video card from a defunct company, the pile of parts from Fry's, and the software hacks to keep the Athlon running cool, I had no luck. At least with a blue-screen-of-death I can see which driver or program caused the crash. Tried to install XP Service Pack 1, but Microsoft had shut out the Corporate Edition key that all the pirated copies were using. Of course, the warez folks were way ahead of that, and a quick search on Kazaa (the spyware-less hacked version of course) yielded a key-gen program and complete instructions on circumventing the check. Didn't help.

Finally got the machine into a productive state by reinstalling and rolling back the video card drivers to the original OEM versions. Thanks to VoodooFiles who kept the flame alive now that 3dfx is no more. Now with MacOS X, the Mac is finally more stable than the PCs (I didn't have to deal with flakey PCs because I always used NT-based kernels). Unfortunately Apple releases too many software updates, so I can't really be an uptime whore. Might go up to the computer fair next weekend. I think it's time for a real video card, and maybe a wireless mouse, too.