Annals of Computing

I'm not exaggerating or being overly dramatic when I say that the past week of computer problems had put me into a really dark place.  As I said yesterday, the week-long attempt at repairs was humbling, frustrating, humiliating, scary, and lonely.

What was it that Marshall McLuhan once said about media being an extension of our senses?  How television is an extension of our eyes allowing us to see further and radio an extension of our ears?  In keeping with that logic, computers are an extension of our minds, and having my laptop go down felt like my mind was crumbling.  Think HAL in the film 2001.

But not only did I fix it, I think I even found the underlying reason that my computer was slowing down to a crawl to begin with.  In one of the many resources I looked at on line, I learned that a recent Microsoft patch for the "new build" of Windows 10 that I installed back in July has a bug of its own that for some reason turns Cortana, Microsoft's largely ignored voice-recognition assistant, into a CPU hog.  Others who had the patch reportedly experienced the same problem as me, and Microsoft had to issue a bulletin acknowledging the problem.

The solution may have been to simply delete that one patch (the fix was worse the the original problem) instead of resetting the entire OS, but I didn't learn that until afterwards.  I checked to see if Update KB4512941 was still in the list of updates and it wasn't - which is probably why I'm not suffering that problem any more.  

If you have Windows 10 and are concerned about this issue, go to "Settings," select "Update & Security," and then click the box that says "View Update History."  A list of all the patches will appear and you'll need to manually search for Update KB4512941.  If you find it, there's an "Uninstall Updates" option at the top of the page.  

Or you can go nuclear like I did and reformat the whole operating system back to it's original state and delete every app and program on your hard drive.  

Or you can do what I was tempted to do a couple of times and turn off the computer, close the cover, place it in your car, drive to the ocean, and throw it in.  

I know you're supposed to responsibly recycle your electronics, but screw it.