Dealing with NDE (Near-death experience)
I think my computer has been experiencing a NDE (near-death experience). The good news is it's in recovery, I guess.
I've never been in a coma or even been hospitalized, so I don’t really know what's NDE like.
But all data from the performance monitor* indicated that my computer was in
this extreme state. It started suddenly, getting super slow response, it was not hung up, it's still
alive and according to the performance monitor there were lots of brain (CPU) activities were going on.
So it's not dead (yet). But it seemed dead to me. How dead? Sometimes the CPU usage hit 100%
for more than 10 seconds. It looked like a "flat line". Don't die on me, not now! I haven't even saved my
file. If this is in the hospital, a nurse must be on the way with a doctor.
I read that people who have had NDE report similar memories like beautiful flowers, the lights and somebody close to them
(your old grandma, family, friend, cousin or pet etc) was calling their name and if they followed the lights or voice, they got out
of the extreme states. I don't know what my computer was dreaming of and I don't think my computer could hear me but I was
almost crying out in my head "Come back come back come back come back!!! NOW!!" and when I got the key
response from it then "Don't go, don't go, don't go, don't Go!!!!" and when it looked back to normal then mumbling "okay, okay
okay, easy easy easy... oh no, not again!!".
By the way, the machine which was experiencing NDE is Japanese version of Windows Server 2003 and there are many
real-time message monitoring type of application including anti-virus software running in my computer.
I know some of them could cause this problem. I searched through Microsoft web site to fix this problem and found the
following article: Issues that are fixed in Outlook 2003 by Office 2003 Service Pack 1
"If you double-click an e-mail message header to download the full e-mail message, CPU usage may be 100 percent
if you are using a slow connection." http://support.microsoft.com/kb/872839/en-us
After installed Office 2003 Service Pack 1 and killed one application my computer has been doing fine. I guess the combination
of Outlook and the application I killed was causing super slow performance. The strange thing was when I was having super slow
performance issue the network usage was almost always 0%. Anyway it's good to get my computer back from near-death situation : )
*MSDN for everyday life: Performance Monitor
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/tools/tools/performance_monitor.asp
