I'm still not at a point where I can devote time to this project, but I am making it easier for myself when I do get the time. I've got some dedicated space set up in the garage to work now, so I no longer have to rearrange my desk or suffer the noise and disruption of the living room or walk all the way to the library. The next challenge has been my computer.

This isn't the newest laptop, but it still has enough processing power and memory to do this work. My issue at this point is that the Windows install (as has often been the case in my life) develops weird and hard to solve instabilities that makes it very difficult to get any work done. This was my big reason for moving to Linux back in 2015. When completing my Cert IV last year, I faced a truly bizarre problem where an error report kept getting logged, eventually gobbling up all available hard drive space. I'd say I lost close to a week investigating that issue and putting it to rest. Now my issue is random shutdowns.

This actually had more than 1 cause. 1 reason this was happening was that my US / Australian power adapter would sit awkwardly in the 240v socket and I'd find out (too late) that I was actually on battery power. That issue is put to bed now, but every time I turn my back on this machine I come back and find it booted into Linux instead. Linux is my default boot option, so I surmise some little gremlin keeps sneaking in behind me and rebooting Windows. When I log back on I check the Event Viewer and find under Windows Logs > Critical a new instance of EventID 41 [Kernel Power]. This event gets logged anytime Windows restarts and detects it was improperly shut down.

This bug really has my goat right now because Linux never randomly reboots on me. Ever. And it does run on in a dual-boot on this same exact machine. I've done hard drive scans from both OS's (I know, funny how secure Windows is - I can mount and read/write anything in that partition from Linux) and found nothing wrong. I've disabled quick-boot. I've run the sfc utility from Powershell. I've disabled sleep mode. I've updated all drivers and brought Windows current with all its updates. I doubt Event 41 would be logging due to an update restart though. I'm at a loss when it comes to pinning down a culprit here, unless I see it in action which I never do.

All I can think to do at this point is replace the hard drive with a fresh install of Windows. Putting an SSD into this thing would actually be a pretty cost effective upgrade, but then you've got the Windows license fee on top of that and the lost time getting stuff like Visual Studio installed again (VS 2019 community edition is HUGE). Also I may be able to get my hands on an old Macbook, so I would finally get to compile the iOS Xamarin project and see how this looks on an iPhone.