Computer hiccups

A few problems with the weather station computer lately, although no data has been lost, at times graphs on the site will have appeared broken or 'smoothed' as gaps are filled in with stored data from the Vantage Vue logger.

About the 2nd week of November, the netbook which stores and uploads data began stopping the software several times a day - it restarts itself if this happens but sometimes the gap can be at least 15 minutes so was becoming a problem.

I temporarily transferred the software to an old laptop, then completely re-installed the Netbook's Windows XP as it has been running continuously for more than two years - and seemed to be using too much resource just to tick-over.

After all the windows updates were applied, things looked good with lots of spare capacity and almost nothing installed except a fresh download of the weather-display software.
I replaced all the recorded data on the netbook, and it ran smoothly for about 24 hours, but then first thing in the morning everything had stopped - black screen and un-responsive keyboard but apparently the hard drive was running.

Pushing the shutdown button and restarting seemed to solve it and missed data was downloaded from the Vue logger.
I thought nothing much of this as there have been unexplained stalls a few times before.
However it then ran only 3 or 4 hours before stalling again!
It seemed as though the original continual re-starting issue was still ongoing but was now managing to crash the fresh install of XP!
Not good.

Further investigation and google-searching for similar problems suggested updating drivers would be worth trying. After doing that it has run continuously for more than 24 hours so maybe it has settled down again.
It does give a feeling of achievement to fix them but all to often there is much frustration involved!

Update, 24th December:
The Netbook and WD software went on to run continuously for almost a month after the driver updates were installed.
The data counter reached a record near 1 million but then there was a Windows update which needed a restart!