Referral Link: http://www.senserely.com/referral/7777778

For today’s strictly computing-related “blog-entry” I’ve decided to write about the unattempted reboot that I experienced yesterday and about the reasons why I hate these sudden reboots so much. So as mentioned, same as others I guess (but I do it much more passionately) I really totally hate such unplanned reboots, and I am trying to avoid them at all costs (and this time I was even in the middle of downloading something huge and important, with many programs open and running, and of course with more chance for data loss etc.) because of the many reasons …

You see, the story goes like this: yesterday I attempted to check the pictures in the IE’s cache with IrfanView’s Thumbnails viewer. But then I noticed that it doesn’t “see” my RAM disk, and so I tried with “Search” feature, and latter clicked on “Show all in Thumbnails” button, and then the computer was restarted, i.e. there was no BSOD, and yes, I certainly do have “Automatically restart” under “System Failure” in CP’s System applet unchecked. For example in my particular situation, as mentioned, the Internet Explorer’s cache is located on my RAM drive/disk, then I have various .ini, .cfg and other config. files of numerous programs located on it (which I usually copy back to hard-disk in their last state before rebooting, and on the next boot-up back to RAM drive), but of course, I mostly use my RAM drive as a location for various .log files (but these don’t matter), while also I have many other files temporarily stored on it, and I am also used to copy these somewhere to hard-disk in (e.g. if I haven’t read or used them yet etc.) before rebooting.

Then regarding the unplanned reboots in general, they also cause Firefox to loose its cache (i.e. if the “firefox.exe” process is running during the reboot), and yeah, I am still on dial-up, but fortuantely I have “Cache Fixer”: http://imglikeopera.mozdev.org/cache_fixer.html extension installed for this reason.

Links to few related screenshots:

http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/224/tccacheswe7.png

http://img401.imageshack.us/img401/9096/tccachesinternetcont…

http://img104.imageshack.us/my.php?image=irfanviewdrivesvw8….

(thumb-version: http://img104.imageshack.us/img104/5203/irfanviewdrivesvw8.t…)

http://img504.imageshack.us/my.php?image=irfanviewsearchei9….

(thumb-version: http://img504.imageshack.us/img504/3316/irfanviewsearchei9.t…)

Then on next boot I checked the EventViewer, and so I saw thet there was an event with the following info in it (see righ here below); and by the way, I haven’t seen any popup (that’s mentioned below under “Description:”), so I guess the PC was rebooted before it could even show up.

Event Type: “Information”

Event Source: “Application Popup”

Description: “Application popup: Windows - Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low : Your system is low on virtual memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file. During this process, memory requests for some applications may be denied. For more information, see Help.”

Well, I was a bit surprised that such a “no-low-level” program can cause such a dramatic system failure (obviously showing all the thumbs requires a lot of memory), and also be warned that “Show all in Thumbnails” feature (I assume using it on a RAM disk is/was not the reason) in IrfanView can/might cause this problem. But anyway, at least I know for sure what it was that was causing this reboot, i.e. much better than when you need to “haunt” the reason!!!

P.S. - I wrote about this unfortunate event also in the thread that I have entitled “The reboot that I caused: VM Minimum popup”: http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/99609816/…, so that you can check it out if you might want to.

Ivan Tadej (user: “tayiper”)

Referral Link: http://www.senserely.com/referral/7777778a