hardware woes

On Wednesday my machine at work started acting up. Frequently and (apparently) randomly, it will just go into hyperspace -- something is consuming all of the CPU, leaving no cycles left to, say, launch emacs or follow a link in a browser or get a directory listing from a shell. The task manager reports improbable results, e.g. saying that Netscape is consuming 50% of the CPU when it's not doing anything. I tried all the standard tests (disk errors? viruses? defrag?) to no effect.

So this morning one of the sys admins tried to patch the OS. It didn't work. So now this weekend he's going to try bringing it up to date on service packs and patches (it's out of date, and when he tried to install SP2 the machine crashed and the OS needed to be patched again.) All of this took something over 3 hours, and the machine is still sick, and I can find no pattern to it and no precipitating event. I mean, it's not like I installed any new apps or changed any system settings last week before leaving for the 4-day weekend. The machine wasn't even turned on during that time.

I sure hope I'll have a functional machine on Monday. The periodic reboots are a real impediment to getting work done.