Check the Simple Things First

So today’s problem came from the Circle Cinema in Tulsa, OK. (As a side note, you have any passion for movies you should really check out this place and make a donation to help with the reconstructions http://www.circlecinema.com). As needed, I donate time and parts to the Circle to help keep things running.

A call came from the day manager at the Circle who said their ticket computer had gone “wacko” and he was wondering, needing, begging me to come by and take a look at it. Considering this computer was used to process all ticket sales, concession sales, and was also used credit card processing, I kind of understood why the manager was in a bit of a panic.

So repair procedure number one is to get from the non-technical description of “wacko” to something a little more technical about what was going on. The system was your typical HP desktop computer with Windows XP, with the only odd addition was a special touch screen monitor and point of sale software. After a little bit of Q&A over the phone, the deeper issues came to light. The computer acted hung or frozen after booting. The hard disk drive access light was flashing occasionally, the login screen was up, but when you clicked on a user account, nothing would happen. After repeated tries, the machine would eventually allow a user to login, but even after login the manager described it as incredibly sluggish.

Of course this gets your head spinning about all the others times you have seen slow PCs. Likely causes were a virus, zombie-ware, and worst case was a hard drive going bad. I know, somebody out there is saying, “a hard drive going bad, how could that make the system sluggish?” One of the warning sign of a hard drive starting to die is parts of the hard disk become unwritable. When the operating system runs out of free RAM, the OS will write a chunk of what is stored in RAM out to the hard drive (technically this is called paging). If a section of the hard drive has become damaged or just worn out, a write error will occur. The operating system will be determined to page the RAM to disk and will retry a few times and then give up, mark the this part of the hard drive as bad, and then try a new spot on the drive, wash, rinse, and repeat. All this time, the user of the computer has until the OS gets its way with the hard drive, so the system can look frozen or hung, and then suddenly come back alive when the OS finally finds a good place on the hard disk.

After driving over to the Circle, I watch and yes the computer acted just as described. The system would boot up fine, but take minutes to respond to a mouse click. You could keep clicking and clicking and then finally, something would load up. I headed back to my house to pick up some tools, disks, and a hard drive so I could make a complete backup of the system before trying to make any changes. Parting words to the manager was that it would be a good idea to find his old credit card imprint machine just in case we could not get this fixed today.

Made it home and started collecting things I might need: my laptop, a spare IDE hard drive, Ghost Boot Disk, screwdrivers, etc. This is the point where you have to appreciate the times when you get to look at a problem, and then walk away for a few minutes, because while I was gather everything up, I had a thought, “We didn’t really check the mouse”, so just to be safe, I grabbed a spare and headed back to the theatre.

After returning to the theatre, I tried my mouse theory whim, and holly crap, that was the problem. The right mouse click button on the old mouse had worn out. Like anybody standing at an elevator door hitting the button over and over thinking, this time it was making a difference. The sluggish response was simply the mouse button was only responding about every tenth click. Just to be safe, we checked the windows system event logs for disk problems and none were found. Did a spyware and virus scan and the system came back clean. Then we did a small dance because it was just a bad mouse caused by age, a spilled coke, or popcorn butter instead of something major.

Moral of the story is don’t forget to check out the simple things first before you bring out the big guns and assume it is the worst.

BK