Ooops.

Last night, amidst some conversations about life, Gilday noticed that his laptop was running really hot. With a good ‘ol Control + Alt + Delete, we brought up the task manager and found that his CPU was running at a whopping 100%. Oh Noes! After many abandoned ad-aware programs because of crashing and many processes stopped, we ended up booting up in safe mode and running the program again. Funny, no infected files…

As well as doing this, I was also troubleshooting some of the processes that were using up all of his memory on the trusty Mac. Gilday would shoot out a process using more than its share, I’d google it and then tell him whether or not to end the process.

There was one in particular that kept on coming back after he ended it. I found a blog entry from a guy who was describing our exact problem. It turns out that there were some files in his print spool that were never sent to the printer and were sitting there, reeking havoc on his hard drive. A simple trip into administrative tools and deleting those pesky files did the trick. He was up and running at normal speeds in less than a minute.

After the fact, I asked him how long his laptop had been behaving like that in which he responded “just today.”

As if a light bulb turned on in my head I knew why. I was the unknowing culprit. In an attempt the other night to print out some files from Smith (my macbook pro) to our networked printer, I inadvertently sent the files to his laptop instead. I just thought that the reason the printer wasn’t working was because of a Mac compatibility issue. I got bored with the project and, since it wasn’t time sensitive, I sent the files to work to print there. Meanwhile, his little laptop sat there processing the files until it couldn’t take it anymore.

Oops. What a way to spend the evening, eh? And we thought we'd have to talk to each other or watch Deal or No Deal... Sorry Gilday…