Intermittent crashes

I few weeks ago, I got up in the morning and went to my main workstation. I saw the blue login screen. I have Windows Update set to download but not install the updates, so it wasn’t a 3:00 am automatic update. I looked at the error log. Not much help there.

“Once is happenstance,” I thought, and logged in.

Three or four days later, the same thing happened.

“Twice is coincidence,” said I, and logged in.

A few days later it happened again.

“Three times is enemy action,” I mumbled, and set to work trying to fix whatever was wrong.

In my experience, these seemingly random, highly intermittent, failures almost never fix themselves. Left unattended, they tend to get worse until you are staring at a totally nonfunctional machine with a deadline approaching.

In trying to troubleshoot these kinds of failures, I am torn between the engineer in me wanting to know what was wrong and the photographer just wanting the darned thing to work. With highly intermittent failures, the photographer usually wins. That means trying several things at once.

My first thought was that I’d loaded some app that was causing the problem. I uninstalled some of the most recent ones (but not Adobe Creative Cloud, of which I was a little suspicious since it was so large and so new – the reason I left it was that it takes a whole day to download and install). I also updated the display driver. Windows gives drivers a pretty free reign, so a driver bug is a good place to look for what’s causing a total system crash.

After a few days, I was sitting at my computer when it happened again. From desktop to black screen, followed immediately by the POST. No blue screen. No error messages.

I started to suspect hardware, and the prime suspect was the Uninterruptable Power Supply. One of my least favorite things about APC UPSs is that aged batteries can cause intermittent power outages even though the APC self-test routines don’t complain. I ordered a new set of batteries.

I also thought about turning my main workstation into my backup workstation. I had purchased a Dell T7600 in December, which was significantly stronger than the T7500 where I spent most of my time. I had thought that it would be dedicated to run Matlab, and that I’d use Remote Desktop to access it, but things hadn’t worked out that way. I mostly ran Matlab on the T7500, and the T7600 gathered dust.