Every once in a while something goes wrong with my computer that surprises even me. Yesterday, while I was multi-tasking about nine or ten fairly resource heavy applications, my desktop suffered a sort of mini-meltdown. It didn’t help that my hard disk had reached capacity either.

“No problem,” I thought to myself, “I will shutdown some of these programs and life will go back to normal.”

The computer had slowed to a crawl and was now moving like some rusty piece of antique machinery. There were long pauses as programs shutdown that tended to be far more boring than they were dramatic. Finally, all of the non-essential apps were closed and the machine continued to dawdle.

“We need breathing room,” I said to myself, feeling somewhat exasperated. I found my way into my bloated My Documents folder and purged files mercilessly. They didn’t delete right away, it took a bit of time. Once that had been completed, things did start to move a little better but were far from perfect. I scheduled a defrag for 0200 and then hit restart.

The machine was soon powering up and going through the usual start-up diagnostics without any problems. Then Vista Ultimate X64 starts to load, and load and load and load and then black screen. A Vista novice might think that the long black screen requires a reboot, but it was not the first time I encountered this issue. Every once in a while the HDD gave a tell-tale sign of life.

I flopped down on a beanbag, checked the clock and waited. I remember thinking to myself that if it took ten minutes it might actually be funny. It made it to twelve and I resolved that I would write about it. Yes folks, Windows Vista Ultimate 64-Bit edition took no less than 12 minutes to load, probably closer to 15 minutes if you count the down time before I checked the clock. It is slower and it really does have more bugs! Perhaps I need to shutdown more often.