ROUGH WEEK!
Zathras (Dell Latitude E6510, from ~2010) is still having kernel freezes, where Windows 10 just freezes completely. This one is very difficult to track down. I think it happens more often when the aging hard disk is under heavy load. So, I just spent ~$100 on a new SSD for him.
RacerX (Dell XPS 730x, from 2009) is having a problem with his after-market water cooler, Corsair H80i v2. That cooler is only 1.5 years old, but was struggling to keep the CPU cool lately - temps on the overclocked i7-965 were 85-95*C instead of my usual 70-85*C. And now (due to my troubleshooting), the cooler doesn't cool AT ALL (CPU goes to 100*C during Windows bootup, and cpu thermal throttles the clocks real low to stay alive). So, I just spent ~$130 on an identical-replacement cooler plus 3-year-protection-plan plus performance thermal grease, for him.
Both orders are being expedited, and I will install the hardware early next week.
Speed, who is on the Insider Fast partition, picked up an Insiders-only NVIDIA driver update from Windows Update, version 387.68. However, when I loaded GPU tasks, I got a GSOD (green-screen-of-death, an Insider thing), and it LUCKILY didn't take out my 3 RNA World tasks! I used DDU and reinstalled the latest supported driver, 385.41, and also used the "Show or hide updates" troubleshooter package to hide that problematic GPU driver.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel ... -in-window
Whew. All in all, no data loss yet, but I'm mid-way through a technology crap-storm. Those who know me, know that I actually enjoy it.
I'm going to make these PCs SING again! I'm lucky to have a wife that lets me throw some money at these adventures sometimes, hehe!
Oh... And Oracle released VirtualBox 5.1.28. And I found a nasty BOINC 7.8.2 bug where, if using an Account Manager that requests a delayed detach to a project because of a URL change, BOINC gets into a stupid loop where it communicates with the Account Manager every 10 seconds infinitely. Hurray that I found it at least?
David Anderson says it'll get fixed in the next BOINC release. I'm going to send BOINCstats a donation, their bandwidth costs must be ludicrous this month.