Intermittent Problems

You know what I really fucking hate? If you read the post title you do. Intermittent problems. I have a logical rational and determinative approach to problem solving PC's.

Step One. Discover Something is not working.
Step Two. Make an educated guess as to the cause.
Step Three. Come up with a way to find out if that cause is actually the cause.
Step Four. Use that way to test.
Step Five. Check if the problem remains.
Step Six. If the problem remains go back to Step Two. If the problem is gone, Congratulations you have solved the problem.

Say the display shows a blank screen only. Guess it is the video card. Reason that if the video card is swapped and another one works it is the video card. Swap the video card. Display active? Yes? Then it is the video card.

This is brilliant. However, I really fucking hate it when you cannot rely on Step Five. This is the crappy situation where, for example, the VGA connector on the motherboard or the cable to the monitor has a wire or pin on the verge of breaking. Hence the simple act of jiggling all the connectors by removing one card and replacing it with another can, temporarily, solve the problem of a blank display despite the fact that the problem really was not caused by the card.

You think you have solved the problem, but give it a few hours, days or weeks, and it will reoccur. You are now back to Step One, but you now cannot rely on Step Five. Or in other words, you are fucked.

This is extremely annoying, and it turns problem diagnosis into an exercise in statistics. I feel a bit like Einstein, complaining loudly and longly about the unfairness of a universe in which matters cannot be predicted by a study of cause and effect. Instead you are left floundering in a sea of random chances and statistics.

I have an intermittent problem at the moment - a 750GB SATA HDD keeps disappearing. Not literally, obviously, but Windows from time to time just forgets it is there. I lose all my desktop shortcuts to that disk and it does not show up in My Computer. A swift restart fixes this, and the disk comes back. I have no idea why this is happening. It could be the disk on the way out. It could be a dodgy SATA cable. It could be the SATA controller on the motherboard. It could be the drivers for the SATA controller on the motherboard.

The Step 3 plan is to swap the cable, and use a different SATA port on the motherboard. I will be unable to rely on Step Five though, because the fucking thing may keep working for a week or two before the problem re-occurs.

Pain in the arse.