Since this has been going on for a year and nobody in the world seems to have a clue why, it's unlikely that I'll find answers here. However, I'm completely desperate, just about ready to cry, and if anyone does happen to be a techy sort you have no idea how much I would appreciate some input.
Apologies in advance, I don't really know the words for things so am just describing the problem as best I can.
The situation:
My PC works fine, until I try to do something really intensive like gaming. The whole machine will suddenly start to run very slow, and upon further investigation there will be an error in the event viewer thing. This error varies slightly but is usually one (or a combination of) the following:
"The driver detected a controller error on DeviceHarddisk0D."
"The device, DeviceIdeIdePort0, did not respond within the timeout period."
"An error was detected on device DeviceHarddisk0D during a paging operation."
Once this happens, the whole computer will run extremely slowly until restarted. Unfortunately, restarting it doesn't work. The first time, when starting back up, it'll stop and say "disk read error" and I have to ctrl-alt-delete to restart again. The second time it'll get further along, but just as Windows is loading it'll bluescreen and reset itself again so fast it's impossible to see what the bluescreen message is.
This cycle will repeat (disk read error, bluescreen, disk read error, bluescreen) until I turn the whole thing off, leave it for around 10mins, then turn it back on. Then it'll be back to running great until I try to play a game.
What we've tried replacing with no effect whatsoever:
Hard drive (twice)
Motherboard
Processor
Power supply
RAM
Graphics card
I've also tried stuff like only playing games when there's nothing else running, endless malware scans, turning all game settings down to the lowest. Waste of time.
I'm basically at the point where I'm so desperate, I'm just going to post this in every conceivable place online until someone comes up with a theory. Please, no matter how crazy it sounds, if you think you know why this might be happening feel free to share. I can't answer any particularly techy questions but I can relay them to Other Half who is much more knowledgeable on this stuff.
Thankyou thankyou thankyou, and sorry for the completely OT thread.
Just in case this thread ever comes up in someone's search...
I considered going through a job site like the suggested vWorker (thanks Adam) and various others, but ideally I'd prefer to work with someone local so in the end I braced myself for the onslaught of spam replies and put up an ad on Gumtree.
I have found someone, the downside is that she's just setting up her freelance business so no doubt we'll hit certain speedbumps that wouldn't happen with someone who's been in business for a while. The upsides being that new freelancers don't charge as much, and she has all the relevant experience.
I think I prefer this arrangement to hiring someone really experienced and overly formal. We'll see how it goes. :happy
A lot of us are actually full-time freelancers with no "day job" at all, I worked in admin before teaching myself web development but it wasn't exactly stimulating, went freelance as soon as I'd saved up a bit and was feeling brave.
It's always recommended to get a business bank account if you're serious about growing the business. It's much less effort to keep track of your finances for tax time and you're not running the risk of violating the terms of your personal account, not to mention it looks a lot more professional if you have clients who pay by direct transfer (no Paypal fees, yay!). A lot of business accounts are available free for x months too so you can give it a try without a monthly fee or such nonsense.
That said, if the terms of your personal account are fine with business use and you don't care about slightly more admin, you should be fine :)
Personally I don't keep paper copies of invoices etc because I think it's a waste of paper. They're saved on my PC, laptop, backed up on a hard drive as well as online for good measure! That should cover everything except a zombie apocalypse in which case I'll be too busy beheading things to worry about admin.
Victorious is a bit aggressive, but also correct. Professionals don't let wannabe professionals use Dreamweaver, get yourself a proper editor :)
I have no book recommendations, sorry, it's not really how I learn. If you don't relish the thought of Googling everything yourself (which does work, btw) you could always consider one of the courses from SitePoint/Learnable.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm struggling to find anything resembling a decent freelance VA in the UK. I'd prefer to work with an individual who I can get to know, rather than a company which seems to be the only sort of thing I can find.
If anyone knows a good place to look, or knows an awesome VA, or is in fact an awesome VA themselves, do tell!
Details: I'm looking for someone to just generally help out really. Organising emails, updating blogs, researching prospects, trying to stop me from running out of business cards before remembering to order new ones, things like that 😛
I may have accidentally slept for 12 hours, including right through 2 alarms, until 2pm this afternoon. So my morning was pretty good but my afternoon is horrendous 😛
When you register as self-employed with HMRC they ask for your name, and the business name. Using a pseudonym for the business name is no problem.
I'm trading under what will be my married name (currently engaged), with a "Current Name t/a Michelle Dancer" business bank account. This means I can accept cheques under either name.
You may however run into trouble if you're 100% trying to keep your real name secret from everyone you work for...for example if you send invoices by Paypal to an overseas client they have your real name on, and I'm sure plenty of other things do too.
TL;DR: Register the trading name and feel free to not mention your real one until you're taking someone's money :D
The awkward thing in your situation is using the work you've done for the company, I can't really see how you're going to keep that secret from them indefinitely. Be sure there's nothing in your contract with them that forbids it, and be honest on your portfolio site about what you did/didn't do on a given project.
Unless you're particularly lacking some custom stuff for your portfolio, I don't see any problem at all with modifying a template.
The template needs to be suitable though, sometimes the changes you need to make are so extensive it would've made more sense just to code it from scratch!
You should check the terms and conditions of a personal account to check if it can actually be used for business transactions, I don't know how common it is but my Halifax account expressly forbids it on pain of death.
I wanted a business account anyway, for the unnecessarily outsized cheque book (and I suppose ease of organisation, but mostly the cheque book).
