(Screen) saving grace?

My readers might remember that the desktop mini-PC I bought a while back has a strange tendency to freeze up if I leave it unattended for somewhere between 40-60 minutes — the power light is on, but the screen is dark and it doesn’t respond to keyboard input, pressing the power button does nothing, and the only way to unfreeze it is to unplug it or stick a paper clip in the reset hole. I never got around to taking it into the shop, since then I might be without it for days, and I learned to manage it just by making sure I touched a key or the trackpad periodically, or shut it down if I was going to be out for a significant length of time. (I also had to give up hibernating it, since it sometimes freezes then as well. It boots up fast enough that I don’t really need to hibernate it anyway, although it shuts down a bit too fast so I have to manually close programs first.)

Well, I think I may have found a partial fix, or at least a way to untether me from having to watch the computer so closely. I know that I can play a video for more than an hour without touching the keyboard, because the computer interprets the video stream as activity/input. So it occurred to me to wonder if turning on the screen saver could have the same effect. I wasn’t entirely convinced by my own logic, but I tried it as a Hail-Mary pass, and so far it seems it might actually be working. I’ve let it go nearly an hour on four or five occasions, nearly an hour and a half once, and about 1:45 once, and it hasn’t frozen. I’ve held off on assuming it worked, since I don’t think it freezes every time, but six or seven times without a freeze is enough to make me guardedly confident.

If this holds up, I’ll be able to spend more time reading or watching DVDs on my TV without having to come over and nudge the computer, and to take longer walks without having to keep an eye on my watch. And the screen saver image I chose (the one called “Mystify,” with colored line segments swooping around the screen and leaving trails) is rather pretty. (I’m surprised Windows 12 doesn’t include the classic “warp stars” animation as a screen-saver option.)

One acid test remains, though I hope it won’t come to pass anytime soon. There have been two occasions since buying the computer when the internet has gone down due to my building’s antiquated phone lines, and I discovered the second time that the PC seems to freeze sooner when there’s no internet connection, though I don’t understand why. So just in case, I’ve set the screen saver to kick in at 35 minutes. It may not work, but hopefully it won’t have to in the foreseeable future.

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In other news, I decided to drive way up to that store that I was told might be able to laser-weld my cracked blue/UV-blocking sunglasses. And it turned out I should’ve called first, since the guy took one look at them and said “I can’t weld those, they’re plastic.” The only help he could offer was to suggest trying superglue, but that wasn’t something he did there, so the whole long drive was wasted. Except I stopped at the grocery store on the way back and bought some superglue, and so far it seems to be holding.

Although I decided to use those sunglasses as my backup pair, keeping them in the car in case they’re needed. I wasn’t too satisfied with the replacement pair of blue-block sunglasses I bought, since they didn’t fit well over my regular glasses and I didn’t think they worked quite as well as the old pair. I decided one day to try the backup pair I had in the car, a wraparound visor type designed to go over glasses, and I found it was a newer, better pair than I thought it was, a replacement I must have gotten at one point for the ones I thought I still had, though I have no memory of when I got it. Anyway, its lenses aren’t amber, just gray, but it seems to block glare about as well as the old blue-blockers, or at least better than the new pair, and it fits much better over my glasses than either of the blue-blockers. So I returned the new pair and have gone on using the wraparounds. Which means I can finally see the blue sky again, not to mention the blue LED on my car’s solar trickle charger.

Though next weekend is the annual Shore Leave Convention, so I’ll see how well those sunglasses work on a long, long drive…