I am not usually up this late, but I’ve been working a lot tonight. So it’s 1AM and I am still sitting in front of my computer. That’s when it happened… an occurrence that looked eerily like something I’ve seen recently, when my expensive video card died. The system became excessively busy, the mouse pointer froze, and eventually, the Aero glass interface was shut down, for no apparent reason. Oh no… was my computer about to kill another pricey graphics card? But then, in a few minutes, everything was back to normal, with no sign of trouble in the Event Viewer. The only relevant entry was one indicating that the Aero user interface was shut down by a request from the Windows System Assessment Tool. But why? Then, this sentence on Wikipedia caught my eye: “In addition to tests requested by the user, WinSAT is scheduled to automatically run every week. The default schedule is 1am on Sundays”.
Live and learn.