alright, let's hope that stays put until i'm finished doing what i'm doing, at least.

what else could be wrong?

i think the drives are fine, but i'm a little iffy on the processor.

and, i vaguely recall needing to reinstall cubase after the script, due to resetting some system files...

well, i recently bought some new lithium batteries, so why not try a brand new one?

no, that didn't do it...

the only thing that ever seems to work with this thing is flashing the bios, and i wish i understood why, exactly.

i messed around with the page file and environment variables, and i'm running a defrag.

i know these are old timey concerns, but it seems like it's either that all of the ram is bad or none of the ram is.

it was stable with 3 gb for quite a while...

yeah, i'm far less convinced that the issue with this thing is related to ram...

i got the board to read all 4 gb, and i'm going to stick with that for a bit. instead, i've unplugged the card reader, because i don't use it in that device anyways.

yeah, it seems better after doing that. good. 

it sucks not having confidence in your hardware, but i haven't been able to demonstrate that there's anything wrong with any of it, either.

i'm trying to remember if i had this problem before and i don't remember.

however, i vaguely recall figuring this out a while back. i backed up my appdata directory so i copied it back over and the load process was instantly different.

i don't need every single plugin to load every time i launch, what i need is to figure out if i've got a ram issue or not, and there's no easy way to do that....

the immediate concern is just making sure that the plugins i recently downloaded actually launch. so let's hope i can get through that without it freezing further, then try to bring some more ram back in.

of course, the idiot cops seem to think i'm hiding secret messages from the kremlin somewhere, and they seem to keep fucking with my bios, so i might need to get in the habit of clearing my cmos whenever i come in from somewhere in order to get the machine to run properly.

*sigh*.

i've swapped the ram around and it keeps halting, so i'm going to have to shut everything off in cubase to start, then bring it all in one by one.

naw, it crashed with 2 in it, too...

i know i have a questionable stick, but i lost track of which one it was.

so, let's try with 1.

of course, i could also have some unstable plugins, right.

so, i launched cubase to check to see if the eax plugin was loading, and it froze with the third stick in.

i took it out, and it booted.

here's what i don't know right now - is the stick bad, is the board funny or is cubase having difficulty with this hybrid ram channel thing? what i mean is this - if i have two sticks in, it loads them together and if i have four sticks in it loads them in parallel. but, when i put three sticks in, it does this weird in between thing.

i have to experiment with it, but i want to make sure everything is loading first.

in the end, if i decide that one of the sticks is bad, i might have to choose between 2 and 4 gb if i want the machine to run. but, i should be able to get 2x1 gb of ram relatively cheaply nowadays, right?

so, like everything else, the next process is going to be a little bit convoluted.

i want to finish my train of thought regarding all of the extra plugins before i do a narration of the last week of events. so, let me rewind to about ten days ago...