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LAST WEEK'S LATE, LATE, LATE NEWS

by Hazed

Last week's Fed2 Star came out much later than usual, so I am sorry to all those who avidly await its publication so you can read it as you munch your breakfast. I was having terrible computer problems which meant the whole thing took a lot longer than it should have done - I finally finished three hours after the usual time.

The problem was that suddenly, my computer started to run extremely s-l-o-w-l-y. A task that should have taken a couple of minutes - copying a page of text into a web page and setting the hyperlinks - was taking about half an hour. It was extremely frustrating and at times I contemplated throwing the computer out of the window and going back to using a quill pen and parchment.

I had experienced slowdowns in the past but they had usually gone away after a while, particularly if I rebooted, but this time nothing seemed to make the computer speed up.

After I finally finished work on the Star, I ran various programs to try to fix whatever was wrong with the damn machine - I cleaned up the registry, defragged the hard disk, and ran a virus and spyware check. By the time this lot was done, just before bedtime, the computer was running faster again so I reckoned the problem was solved.

But the next day, when I got home from work, everything was slow again... but thankfully, just when I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown, Alan came up with the answer. I use a notebook as my main computer and he suggested that it was overheating and therefore switching to a slower process mode.

This made perfect sense. The weather had been getting steadily warmer over the few months that I had been noticing slowdowns, and on the Sunday when it had all turned into a nightmare, it had been the hottest day of the year so far. And of course it would be a bit better late in the evening, when the temperature in the room had dropped again.

He also told me what to do to mitigate the overheating problem - sit the machine on a rack so that air could circulate around it, and open the lid up. And, above all, stop using it as a dumping ground for odd bits of paper! I found a cake cooking rack in the kitchen and put the computer on it, took off all the rubbish I had dumped on top of it, and opened up the lid. And within 10 minutes everything sped up again, and it ran faster than it had for months.

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