This article is more than 1 year old

Render crashing PCs back to their component silicon: They deserve it

Fremen knows, I'm miserable now

Something for the Weekend, Sir? My computer crashed every five minutes this morning. Please can you check what's wrong with it when you get home?

This text message does not surprise me in the least. Mrs Dabbsy's computer never goes wrong when I'm nearby. It waits until I'm out of the house. As soon as it knows I'm safely on a train heading off somewhere, it will choose that moment to stick its head up its own digital arse for maximum inconvenience value.

I knew it would happen. Call it prescience. An over-exposure to the spice, perhaps: I have blue eyes.

Well, it'll have to wait until I get back. Strap up my stillsuit, I'll be riding the first Shai-Hulud home. Oh, here's another message coming in from Madame D:

Sorry for the hassle but I have an urgent job to finish and I know you'll be in Caladan tomorrow.

This is all part of her computer's plan, of course. It knew I would be on the hoof today and 300 million miles away tomorrow, making it an ideal moment to go wrong since, unlike Paul bloody Atreides, I cannot be in all places at once. That computer knew that I'd be setting off at 4.30am, having checked my Google calendar, so it would be all the more amusing to have me spending half the night running disk utilities instead of sleeping.

On my way home, I receive a final desperate missive from Dabbs Mansions: I think it has something to do with Kaspersky?

Ah yes, the coup de grace. The computer knows that if it crashes often enough, it will interrupt a critical download or, in this case, a virus database update and leave it dangling. When she restarted the computer, my wife would be bombarded with a host of misleading messages from all the software that had its nuts sawn off during the crash.

Poor old maligned Kaspersky, fixed in 10 minutes by ditching its database and downloading it afresh. Then a 20-minute scan to be sure there are no infections, no ransomware, no hunter-seekers, no worm-sign. But that's 30 minutes I won't be spending in bed tonight, plus many multiples of 30 minutes for every other emasculated program currently yelling for attention.

My wife's computer is a bastard and I've had enough. This weekend, I will be transferring its data to a new model before celebrating the old one's obsolescence by taking it out to a lonely field at dawn and kicking the shit out of it.

It stands to reason that things go wrong most often and most severely when you're not there to do anything about it.

It's one of the constants of life, like the way your bank waits until you are abroad on vacation before deciding to withdraw your overdraft facility without notice. Or how your children have an uncanny knack of getting hurt uniquely on Sundays so you can't take them to your own doctor at the end of the road but must instead drive 20 miles to a hospital and spend the next seven hours waiting in a queue at A&E.

This column has previously raised the issue of computers sensing when you are in a hurry and applications dramatically slowing down or bombing out altogether. When you don't have a panic on, everything works just dandy: on those occasions, you could probably pull the plug from the power socket, spray lighter fuel over the keyboard and drop a lit match on the lot, yet the computer would carry on working happily.

But woe betide if someone rings you up with a deadline, whereupon merely moving the mouse pointer in the general direction of the spellcheck button is enough to send Microsoft Word tits up and utterly inoperable until you have re-installed Office five times using the original CDs and serial number which you put in a box somewhere in the attic along with your kids' paintings from primary school and that ghastly china dog that some visiting relatives gave you because they were culturally bereft and fucking insane.

We're all used to this. However, this business of computers going wrong only when your back is turned is more than vindictive: it's sneaky. They tiptoe around pretending to do what you want, acting all slick and professional, but all the while they are plotting until they spot the moment you look away – and KAPOW!

They're as sneaky as a Bene Gesserit's G-string.

Screwed by Adobe

I experienced it just this week during a training class I was leading, and a more impressive example of multiple computers colluding on the right moment to crash you would be hard-put to find. All I did was demonstrate a simple process in Adobe Photoshop on my computer and invited my delegates to try... whereupon Photoshop on each of their computers crashed simultaneously.

Here's the sneaky bit: my own computer carried on working fine, waiting for the right moment. It knew that the wailing of my delegates would divert my attention, and sure enough, only when I turned my back to look over at their screens did my computer choose that precise moment to crash.

There was absolutely no reason for these computers to crash out of Photoshop at that moment, none at all. We relaunched the program and repeated the exact steps without encountering any problem – but of course there would be no sneaky amusement for the computers' twisted little digital brains in producing a repeatable error, would there?

It's worse when you restart, as well. Instead of just getting on with things after a crash, the computers piss about for an extra five minutes during startup or relaunch, pretending to put things right and checking caches.

Yeah right, I know what they're really doing: they're just reading a newspaper and smoking a fag, thinking up new ways of going wrong at the next inconvenient moment when my back is turned.

Bastards, the lot of them.

Well, it stops here. They should no longer be allowed to get away with it. I have taken photographs of battered old PCs piled up at my local recycling tip and have installed them as desktop pictures on every computer in the house. Ha! That'll give them something to think about.

In fact, I wish they didn't think about things at all but just did what they are supposed to do. Too much thinking is bad for them.

I declare the Butlerian Jihad open. ®

Youtube Video

Alistair Dabbs Alistair Muad’Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He hopes that normal service will be resumed next week after shredding the naughtiest of his home computers into little strips with his crysknife. He also appreciates that if you don’t understand the relevance of the B-52s video, you probably didn’t understand much else in this column either. Don’t worry, it’s not worth giving water to the dead about.

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like