Wednesday, December 10, 2008

MSN Strangeness ...

(quick warning - techie post ! scan down a little if you find yourself getting lost :-)

As well as trolling forums and peeking at everybody's blogs, I'm usually logged into MSN Messenger with me being available if people want to ask something.

(it's a different address to the one on my blogger profile - and I may be tempted to give it out to the right people ;-) just drop me a line)

Seeing weird things on MSN at the moment though, it'll all of a sudden go up to almost 100% cpu usage. It'll then stay at 100% cpu for 46 minutes ... and then release the cpu back to idle again. Strange ! I first noticed it a few months ago, which had me hunting forums and Google to find out why. The ideas seemed to be around people who use special characters in their online name or in their message. The special characters would cause the Messenger program to have difficulty decoding what they were, which would lead to excessive cpu usage.

The cpu usage is no big deal, except that the laptop answers by ratcheting up the speed on its fans, which kinda gets in the way of listening to music via iTunes. It's not done it for a while but started again yesterday, with MS's WinXP updates coming at the same time probably being a coincidence. So that's 46 minutes of cpu burning, with another hour or so a bit later. Similar tonight, 46 minutes (exactly!) of burn, with another 44 minutes a bit later. Weird.

I've tried a few things, my contacts list has been pruned for one. I think I hit about 35 contacts at one point, mostly due to World of Warcraft people. It's down to 25 now and could probably come down further. I've run the A-Patch too, which I'd recommend for anyone who runs MSN Messenger. It allows you to safely modify the registry settings that control Messenger's behaviour, to do things like cut the adverts out.

Haven't got any answers on this one - Messenger is definitely doing something ... and it's a task that takes the Athlon XP-M2500+ in my laptop about 45 minutes to carry out.

That's the end of the techie stuff :-)

Healthwise, after Monday's fun I've been having the reversal ... Stiff back, dodgy ankles, shoulder cramps, knees that drown out the telly with their creaking and hips that are more statue than snake. I've learned to enjoy the good days as much as possible and to ride out the bad as best I can. It helps to have great people around, a shared smile and a kind word really brightens the day, which goes a long way towards me being able to ignore the aches and pain. And we have some great people on the project I work on. The move across site has been good too and the canteen girls seem to be catchng the grin too :-)

But I do miss the "Hello Pete how was your weekend?" that I got occasionally from the wonderful Miss A. I tried to tempt Miss A to come visit to steal a cake when I brought them in to work for my birthday (project tradition) but I don't think Angel Slices were tempting enough to brave the rain for :-)

2 comments:

  1. Sounds painful! Hope you feel less achy soon and most of all avoid all the nasty bugs going round at the moment!

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  2. I get the feeling that my immune system likes to round up the bugs and put them up against the wall for shooting ...

    Not had a day off sick for ages :-) (well - nosejob accounted for a few and there's a day or so when I stopped eating) I seem to avoid the worst bugs, even though I'm still around people who have to go off sick with bugs.

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