Stuck in Go

Two weeks ago one of my computers started acting a tad freaky. This particular computer is the one I use at work, yes I use my own computer at work. That's just the way I roll. This computer is somewhat odd. It is only a year old, but it has had multiple users over that time. Its a long story that involves a business that went out of business and the ruination of my dreams, but let's skip over that part for now.

So it started acting weird. Being the geek that I am I did the usual usual things, but none of them worked. Finally I had someone else help me and its been operating decently since then.

So on to Eve. About a week before the above "freak out" I started experiencing a rather odd thing during my game play. During grid load if I activated a module, such as a prop mod or guns or the like, they would stay "on" and I would be unable to click, or hotkey anything for a period of time. This period of time would vary from several seconds to several minutes. At first I thought it was lag due to the grid load, but that wasn't exactly right. It was hard to narrow down because it didn't happen all that often, or in a predictable manner.

This wasn't helped by the fact that I mostly fly solo and huge grid loads aren't usually an issue. So I did the usual usual. Cleaned out everything, emptied cache files, re-installed Eve, etc.

Up to this point I had lost two ships because of this issue. One was a rather expensive Prophecy. You may remember reading about that loss a few weeks ago.

But the computer was fixed and the above changes had been made. So I decided to go out on a roam with the boys. During the roam it started happening again when we would load grid in a new system. Little things at first. And then I burned away from the Gate in a straight line down in Syndicate. I should've pulled out at that point but I did manage to get control of the ship and I was determined to finish the roam. And then we hit big grid load back in Low Sec. I turned on my prop mod to burn towards the anchor... well, let's just say that didn't end well.

Since then I've been de-bugging everything I can think of. I'm convinced at this point that it isn't an Eve issue. Something on my end is not working correctly.

The grand tally right now is 5 ships lost to this thing.

And then yesterday talking about this in Tuskers public channel it hit me. And while I can't tell you exactly what it is, I have a process running that... well it protects certain things about my computer. This process happens at random times and during regularly scheduled times depending on certain activities or processes. I was able to re-create the issue twice by scheduling the process and then jumping back and forth between gates. Out of about 12 jumps or so the "bug" happened twice.

Again, I'm no expert, just someone who has been working with computers for... well, a long time. But it appears that when that process coincides with grid load, when those two events happen together, that my client 'freezes' for a moment. And not just the client, but the keyboard as well. So I've re-scheduled that other process and made a few other changes to allow Eve more room to breath.

Hopefully this will stop this from happening again and stop making me feel like an idiot for derping myself. Or at least, from derping myself without myself derping myself without myself's permission.

More testing today. I won't be flying in any gangs until this gets sorted.