Both of our desktops are acting up real bad, and I’m beginning to think it is time to replace them.

Nadia’s WinXP computer seems to blue screen randomly when Media Center starts to record. When it tries to boot up again, an error about needing to put in the system disk comes up on a black screen. I have no idea how to begin troubleshooting this problem.

My Vista computer suffers from random IRQ-related blue screens. The only constant when they come up is that I click the left mouse button. The mouse is new, so maybe that’s it? Then again, these blue screens started months ago when I bought my new video card.

Then there is the annoying issue with Live Photo Gallery which will no longer import pictures from my SD card from the Autoplay window. I’m pretty sure this is related to the most recent Windows Update, and these guys seem to think so too.

Oh yeah, the Home Server I mentioned in my last post? It still backs up my PCs, but I can’t get into the console (the main application for the server) anymore. I can’t remote desktop into any of my computers using their names, I have to use their IPs. That’s a new issue, which came up after the most recent Windows Update.

I had to shut off Windows Media Player sharing (so my 360 can see music on my PC) because it crashed frequently and Vista told me about it all the time. COM Surrogate is crash-happy as well; sometimes it is video that causes the problem, but sometimes it seems random. Opera will crash once in a while when I try to close a tab.

I’ve got this neat Vista Sidebar gadget that lets me control my volume with the mouse. It would be better if it didn’t hang so frequently, forcing me to remove it and put it renable it.

That reminds me of the Logitech SetPoint software that came with my MX 5500 Revolution keyboard and mouse combo. Most of my keyboard’s functions are dependent on it, but it can only run well for a few minutes at a time. It then lags; keys and buttons clicked take many seconds to actually do anything.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. While I’m an MS fan, I’m finding it harder to defend them when my computer has become so unreliable. My birthday is coming up, and I toyed with the idea of going over to the Mac side. The high cost is the primary factor keeping me away from doing that.

Over a year ago I asked who would buy Microsoft’s Windows Home Server. I thought I’d buy one of hp’s MediaSmart Server EX470 as soon as it was released, but I ended up waiting a little while before taking the plunge.

Back in May of this year when I saw it on sale at Newegg, I placed my order and have been using it to protect my PCs ever since. Every night the two desktops and the notebook are automatically backed up. Not just a data backup; an image of the hard drives are taken. In the case of a hard drive failure or some other disaster, the included PC restore disc is supposed to make it easy to pull an image off the server and restore the machine to an earlier point. I got to test this out for the first time tonight.

When Nadia was off at a conference, she accidentally installed the invasive malware program AntiSpywareCheck onto the notebook. Do some searches on removing that app - you will find that there are a few files to remove, a DLL to unregister, and a ton of registry entries to remove. I went through them, one-by-one, and couldn’t find any of the things these guides pointed me to. Yet there in the system tray sat the annoying icon telling me to buy and install the full AntiSpywareCheck product.

After wasting my time with those guides and writing the ASC people a mean e-mail, I turned to my Home Server. If I couldn’t remove this thing, then I’d just roll back to a point before it was installed. That PC restore disc I mentioned earlier couldn’t have made it easier. It took about 60 minutes to fully restore the notebook, which is less time than I spent trying to remove the malware.

There are plenty of other things WHS can do, which I’ll go into in later posts.

Please view the video below to see Vista’s handwriting recognition in action.

Update: Above I show how well handwriting recognition works with Vista. It works a lot better than its speech recognition. I use a Wacom Bamboo to write with, and I used Jing to quickly capture my work as an SWF.

The video is about four minutes long and has no audio.