Shoutbox

OK, first of all, my computer keeps crashing and rebooting, which is a problem of it's own, BUT,

when this happens, when I sign back in to MSN Messenger,

FIRST:
It remembers an OLD sign-in name of my contacts, and logs it as the contact "changing" from that name to the new name AGAIN, each time. It makes the log completely confusing, making it appear this person keeps changing his name back to his old name, then back to the new name.... (Messenger names often contain important information for all of someone's contacts, and making it look like the name was changed back, when it hasn't been that name in days, really confuses a lot of situations, causing panic, if the message was someting to alert to an important event that might have happened days before, making it look like it happened again).

SECOND:
Sometimes when the computer shuts off, the log is saved up to the last entry before it shut off.... BUT sometimes all of that WHOLE DAY'S entries are not in the log, after turning the computer back on, and it only saved stuff up to the previous day or several hours earlier. Obviously this misses important information and makes the log invalid and completely useless.
Why does this happen? Isn't each entry saved AS IT HAPPENS, to the log file? How could data just vanish?!

Plese help with this!

Thanks!

SECOND: It is saved based on a time interval (default: 30 mins)
You could shorten the interval, but it might cause some kind of conflict, which "makes the log invalid and completely useless."

quote:

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Originally posted by thekid
SECOND: It is saved based on a time interval (default: 30 mins)
You could shorten the interval, but it might cause some kind of conflict, which "makes the log invalid and completely useless."

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Nope, since stuff is lost which has been in the Event Window for hours, so it's not connected with the auto-save (archive) interval of 30 minutes.

I have the log saving to an external USB HD, I don't know if that might be part of the problem or not.
But isn't there some sort of "check" built in to verify that a log entry has infact been successfully written to the logfile? Or would it cause some sort of error, or would it simply skip over it, if for some reason it couldn't write to the drive at that time?
Otherwise log files could be missing chunks of information, which, yeah, makes them sort of useless if you look back to try to make sense of a series of events that happened during a time period, (which of course is the whole point of a log file)!