Windows drives me nuts

Published on May 9th, 2007 by Jeremy Chatfield

I had a high priority task to get done, and took over an hour to log in. I have an active AntiVirus package for my Windows system. It detected nothing recently. Was I a rare victim of a Day Zero attack?

Particularly vexatious is that the screen saver keeps running. As you are trying to login, you can’t relax, secure in the knowledge that the next screen you see will be the desktop. You have to keep vigilant, and move the mouse, just a bit, every few minutes. It gets to be about as exciting as watching paint dry. Someone really needs to develop “Paint TV” that shows a series of images as it dries… Anyway, it spoils attention on any other serious projects, while you wait to login and evade the screen saver.

I wasted some time – which I won’t count, as it was my stupidity and ignorance – trying to run the AntiVirus package on all files on the system. After some time, it was estimating completion in between 6 hours and 205 days (or some obscenely large time). I killed the process, eventually, and started investigating the idea of reformatting the disk and re-installing. In doing so, I noticed an article that set me thinking…

After three hours, the Windows Task Manager finally came up, and showed “Spoolsv.exe” consuming 99% of the CPU, doing nothing visibly useful. OK, so this is a 2GHz laptop, 2GB RAM. Should be able to handle the kind of stuff I do (using MSIE7, usually, and some web analytics packages whose vendors are so perverted that the packages only work on MSIE). Four hours before I can even terminate the stupid program that is stopping me from working? Pathetic.

Searching for “spoolsv.exe” showed some promising links. The highest ranked result that was obviously about troubleshooting this problem was kinda OK. But the best answer was a lower ranked link. Here’s what to do if your system goes dog-slow as soon as it boots and you have a process called “spoolsv.exe” hogging the CPU. I’m putting in my link vote for this resource – easy to follow, and it has worked.

What caused the problem? No idea. Can’t find anyone describing how something as stupid as this survives in an operating system that is around twenty years old at this point. It’s seems like bad engineering and inattention to user difficulties. Which is why I loathe Windows. I detest badly designed stuff. I’m biased that way :) I use a Mac for a desk or laptop, or Linux as a server, when I can.

Having got the system back, I re-ran the AntiVirus and “Malicious Software Removal Tools” packages. No problems detected. Except that now the system won’t properly connect to WiFi. It keeps saying that it isn’t connected. Right clicking on the WiFi icon in the System Tray (lower right), lets me see that it has detected one wireless network (the right one) and that it is set to “Automatic Connection”. Clicking on the network is supposed to join it… and it ends up flashing a window that says “Connected!”. Then the “Connect” button changes to “Disconnect”, while the network connection status changes to…. “Not Connected”.

The Windows system will no longer connect to the WiFi that it used to use. I haven’t changed the WiFi settings and and all other equipment (a collection of Apple kit, a mobile phone using Microsoft’s PocketPC with WiFi, etc) is using the WiFi properly. Something has damaged or changed the machine’s WiFi, in some unknown way. Can’t see anything in system logs. More time spent trying to debug. Eventually I give up and run an ethernet cable from a Airport Extreme. More hours wasted trying to find out out why a subsystem that I have not consciously touched, no longer works, and creating a workround.

Windows just drives me nuts.