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BSOD? What's that? Never seen one with Vista. In fact, I think I saw one in 5 years of working with dozens of XP systems.



Taskmanager will always kill a process immediately, but will be more likely to result in loss of data. The "End Now" dialog is a bit more conservative, and also invokes the various (slow) crash logging processes. I two wish the "End Now" dialog actually did what it said, but taskmanager is more than adequate.



You shutdown your laptop? I just close the lid, it goes to standby, and then hibernates after few minutes.

As for the "some crap is not responding" - would you prefer the OS terminate applications and lose your data without confirmation? I think I'd rather have depleted battery.

What I cannot understand is why the shutdown process is such a frigging pain - and it has mostly to do with userland programs that pop up interactive dialogs on shutdown. The OS simply can't know what to do in this instance. It'd be nice if most programs were written to simply save themselves to a safe state on shutdown, and address any outstanding issues when the user next starts the program - "When you last shutdown, you were editing this file but didn't save it, do you want to save your changes or revert?"

This is as far as I bothered to read your post since you are obviously lying through your teeth. Even if the OS were perfect, hardware issues would have caused more than one if you have really spent "5 years of working with dozens of XP systems".

Learn to construct your untruths more credibly if you want to be believed.

Edited 2008-05-30 16:05 UTC

Wow. But sorry, I am telling the truth. I had a Windows 2000 system that BSOD'd a couple times on me, I believe due to hardware issues, though I am not sure, but I am not lying about XP - I remember at most one BSOD with XP, though I might be misremembering that one.

More recently I have a work laptop with XP I used for two years - never BSOD'd. I have a work desktop with XP, 3+ years old, never BSOD'd. I have another work laptop I've been using for 6 months with XP - never BSOD'd. I have a Vista laptop I've been using for 1.5 years, never BSOD'd. I have a Vista desktop I've been using for over a year, never BSOD'd.

But then again I never get infected by viruses or malware, a point which credulous cretins such as yourself also refuse to believe, but I think malware and viruses will significantly increase your chances of BSODing.

It seems that Windows bashing is quite popular here and sadly just for the sake of it.

I, too, haven't had XP BSOD on me, although I take care of about 10-15 systems (those at work, and some of a few friends and family) except a couple of times when dealing with faulty hardware.

To the people that bash Windows: please tell me of an OS as good as Windows, with as many mature applications as Windows (goodbye Linux) and which runs on 300$ hardware (goodbye Mac OS X).

I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm saying it has its merits but you guys fail to see them out of some reason that only you can understand.

"This is as far as I bothered to read your post since you are obviously lying through your teeth. Even if the OS were perfect, hardware issues would have caused more than one if you have really spent "5 years of working with dozens of XP systems".

Learn to construct your untruths more credibly if you want to be believed."

Easy champ. I enjoy reading your posts, and agree with a whole lot of them. Does that mean I am lying when I say I have only seen 1 BSOD on Windows XP since the product was released? The machines I maintain, about 200, have never BSOD. The 1 I refer to was when I was experimenting and doing my best to make it blue screen, and was successful. BSOD is not common on Windows XP, though can be done.

So judging byu that last post, you are using TWO accounts on this site ?
is that not against the sites terms and conditions ?

Afraid I am going to have to agree with joshv on the BSOD issue. I use Windows XP, Windows 2000 and 2003 Server at work and XP at home and I cannot remember the last time I saw a BSOD.

Now I have had issues with misbehaving applications (Outlook/Exchange) that would lock up the system, this is further complicated if you use CAC middleware on your machine (DoD). And the result of those problems have required myself and others to perform a "one finger salute", but I think calling joshv a liar is just wrong. If you have some data to backup that joshv is wrong I'd love to see it.

This is as far as I bothered to read your post since you are obviously lying through your teeth. Even if the OS were perfect, hardware issues would have caused more than one if you have really spent "5 years of working with dozens of XP systems". Learn to construct your untruths more credibly if you want to be believed. "

My God, you're obnoxious.

In what way? I said that hardware issues alone would likely be responsible for more than one BSOD for 25 machines in over five years even if the OS were perfect. I seriously doubt his claim on that basis, regardless of the name or quality of the OS. I am, however, making some reasonable assumptions about the quality of the hardware based upon the fact that XP is the OS referenced rather than 2008 Server, RHEL, AIX, or Solaris.

This is as far as I bothered to read your post since you are obviously lying through your teeth. Even if the OS were perfect, hardware issues would have caused more than one if you have really spent "5 years of working with dozens of XP systems".

Learn to construct your untruths more credibly if you want to be believed. "
Now that you mention it I don't think I have seen a BSOD in about that long. Maybe the original author is just working on really crappy hardware.

Edited 2008-05-30 18:43 UTC

I dunno, I could second that. I've had 3 xp systems in my house since the release of xp, 2 have been perfectly stable with ZERO bsods in 5 years, and 1 has had them weekly. It really comes down to driver support, and if the parent's dozen computers were all of the same model and that model just happened to have a good combination of hardware, no bsods in 5 years is quite doable IME.

The most stable system for me has been my old gateway notebook, the least stable has been my thinkpad t60.

This is as far as I bothered to read your post since you are obviously lying through your teeth. Even if the OS were perfect, hardware issues would have caused more than one if you have really spent "5 years of working with dozens of XP systems".

Learn to construct your untruths more credibly if you want to be believed. "

How do you know he's lying? What, are you so all-knowing in your arrogance that you presume to read people's minds too? Give me a break! He didn't say what he did with the dozens of XP boxes he's worked with over the past five years so, it is indeed possible he's never seen a BSOD in that time. Grow up!

BSOD? What's that? Never seen one with Vista. In fact, I think I saw one in 5 years of working with dozens of XP systems.

I think I have seen my XP installation BSOD once this year. Not much really. But then again, I have had quite a few times when XP just stops responding, or some app stops responding and won't shut down even from the task manager. In those cases it won't help even if you try to reboot or shutdown your machine, it'll just sit there for all eternity. The only solution to such is the power button..

Taskmanager will always kill a process immediately,

As I said above, it doesn't. I have had a whole load of times some app just refuses to shut down no matter what I do and then it's also impossible to reboot the system without pressing reset button.

As for the "some crap is not responding" - would you prefer the OS terminate applications and lose your data without confirmation? I think I'd rather have depleted battery.

Well..in the case of battery getting depleted you will lose the application data anyway.

No, any laptop I've ever used will hibernate as a last resort when the battery is low.

So you've never used Vista, and never will, but you hate it?



Well that's simply not true. If you shutdown and apps or services are not responding, Windows shows the dimmed screen with the list of processes preventing it from shutting down. If you don't answer, it will eventually just shutdown. Then again, I haven't actually seen this screen since the beta, so I'm rather skeptical about it being a common occurrence.

Besides, even if it's stuck and you close the laptop, it will go to sleep. XP may have had some problems with that (mainly due to crapping add-on software from IHVs for docking and such), but Vista doesn't.

I have used Vista for two hours on my new laptop. Finally I wiped the harddisk and installed Ubuntu.

Though i have used microsoft products since 3.11 for workgroups. Perhaps Vista is a different breed but XP included, stopping an application or a hung process isn't as direct and straight forward as it is on on Unix.

It would be nice if from the cli you could "ps -waux | grep <process/app>" and kill -9.

On linux,freebsd,.. i never witnessed a hung cdrom choking the whole system.

This is probably because Vista and XP are set to auto reboot when a system error happens.

One thing that is sure. XP and Vista don't have BSOD as much as Windows 9x. But BSOD still happen on occasion.

I haven't seen XP drop a BSOD not identifiably related to bum hardware in almost 5 years. And, though it pains me to admit it, I've never seen Vista BSOD... ever. I have not seen Windows 2008 BSOD yet despite many connected users over terminal services.

The Windows kernel has been significantly hardened in the last few years, and it shows. Those who complain otherwise about issues that haven't been issues in the better part of a decade sound like people who complain motivated on politics with absolutely no experience with the technologies they complain about.

Early on with Vista I had what probably would have been a BSOD in XP. I installed the latest and greatest Vista nVidia driver (my mistake) and the driver itself would quite frequently crash while playing games. In XP that would have been a BSOD - in Vista the game crashed, and the driver restarted.

These days though I haven't had a video driver crash in probably 6 or more months. nVidia has cleaned up their drivers. No doubt the fact that the system doesn't blue screen when the vid driver goes down helps them troubleshoot the issue.

Very true, Vista does handle more than just video driver crashes much better as well, My sound card drivers used to crash constantly (creative) when vista was just released, but it never BSOD'ed on me, and I could even get sound back by disabling and re-enabling the device, not so on XP, and not so on Linux, which would panic or just freeze all together. While windows has made alot of mistakes, it is becoming quite stable (havent shut down my vista media computer in many many months). Many companies release hardware products that were brilliantly engineered, and hired the cheapest programming team to write the drivers, and its nice to have a kernel robust enough to handle thier mistakes so you can keep on going on.

Exactly. It *is* possible to BSOD Vista, but this is entirely due to driver faults, not the O.S. kernel itself.

Case-in-point: download the latest Razer drivers (if you have a Razer mouse). Terminate one of the smaller child processes like razerhid.exe or razerofa.exe through Task Manager. Then open up the main driver control panel and change a few settings. You won't get past "Apply" or "OK" without a BSOD, guaranteed.

Should I blame Microsoft for this error? Hell no! The blame lies solely with the peripheral maker and its buggy driver software. Thankfully the Lachesis mouse works fine with a generic driver, which is what I use from now on.

Edited 2008-05-30 22:41 UTC

The first Vista machine I used BSODed continuously, mind you it was when the thing had just been released and was running in a crazy laptop. XP has never BSODed on me but it has restarted a few times because of faulty hardware, yet nothing that can be tracked to Microsoft.

You can be mad at them because of their closed-sourcedness, their mafia-pushed standards, the stupid kids they have designing their GUIs, DRM, or the compulsory activation of software as I am, but you(the original flame post) lose all your credibility when you start outright lying about their software and its faults, denying problems with Linux, and other similar FUD tactics. You have become them, YOU ARE MICROSOFT.

The NT kernel is a modern kernel, it is similar to the Linux kernel in some ways, it offers similar features and has been updated as well to include the latest trends in lower end computing. A faulty driver or hardware will screw them both, BSOD or otherwise. FUD from the Windows 95 era is not fun or accurate anymore, so, stop it.

And I thought this site had a better population than Slashdot. In the end the GNUyatolahs are there to spoil any intelligent discussion.

We like OSs and want to discuss the real technical issues and differences between them and to get excited at the prospect of new better systems even if at the end we are gonna be disappointed.

The only time I had Windows XP BSOD was with a bad driver with the pinnacle pctv card I bought - oh, and in Windows NT4 because of a memory module I had which was faulty (and caused issues in Linux as well as Windows 9x too).



The problem is that far too many people here have some sort of emotional baggage that comes with a given operating system - as if the operating system were an extension of their personality, and by virtue of critiquing their operating system, they see it as an attack on them.



Well, don't expect a decent level of conversation here; it is as bad as Digg, Slashdot, Kryoshin and other troll related boards. Arstechnica used to be interesting the battle front until you have the uneducated rantings of cluelessness from the cheap seats.

I'm a Solaris administrator, not a paid Microsoft shill. based on my 10 years of experience in working with and around Windows systems, I can count the number of BSOD's I have seen on two hands. If you are going to bash Windows, at least come up with something that actually happens on a regular basis that would constitute a problem for a large number of users.

I am sure my experiences are not unique, and as others have pointed out poor drivers have a great deal to do with various Windows issues. If you have nothing of substance to add to this discussion other than your anti-Microsoft nonsense, either stop trolling or go somewhere else.

Hilarious. So, people that aren't experiencing BSODs are "Microsoft paid shills" now. Microsoft must have millions of people on its payroll, then... LMAO!

Edited 2008-05-30 20:34 UTC

I've been saying that I have no BSODs, and I don't. I am also not some sort of paid shill. I've had my share of troubles with Vista. I have been hit by some odd search indexer and start menu indexer bugs that caused the search engine to thrash the disk and consume 100% of CPU - only on my desktop though, not my Vista laptop, and it ran fine for a year before the issue.

I disabled search indexing and set my start menu search options to "Don't Search for Files". Which really is a pretty unacceptable solution. Search indexing is a major feature of the OS, I shouldn't have to disable it entirely for some inexplicable reason.

So I have had problems. But this most definitely isn't an issue with the kernel.

Your comments are so wrong about process scheduler. When you press the close button on the window of a process, it sends some windows message to that process. It then waits for some time (sorry i don't remember exact time) and if the application doesn't respond then the dialog box is shown to the user to terminate and send report to Microosft or just terminate and not send report. This is the slow process.

Instead, just open task manager and kill the offending process and it will die in less than 1 second.

He claimed that he regularly has processes that are not killable even in the task manager. I *think* I've run into this behavior once or twice - and procexp from Sysinternals was able to kill the process, but otherwise, 99.9% of the time task manager will do the job.

Going to have to say that I have ran into many processes that task manager just would not kill for one reason or another, but Process Explorer had no issues. Sometimes task manager kills immediately, sometimes after about 1-10 minutes you get the "End Now" dialog, and sometimes that process just happily stays running in the background after telling the task manager where to stick it. I will grant that this latter situation is in the minority, but it definitely does happen. Before discovering Process Explorer the only way to get rid of these rogue pids was a reboot.

I want to say that the kill.exe command would get rid of them as well, but I do not recall if it came standard or if it was something I installed from a resource kit or powertools. I would go look but I don't have any Windows installations left. I have two fully legitimate licenses for Windows XP (not counting any prior versions), and no installed copies. Won't be installing Vista on any machine I own anytime soon.

windows comes by default with the 'taskkill' cli command.

except when it doesent die in less than 1 second, and it takes minutes....

One of the comments in the linked blog entry I think gets to the heart of it. Nobody really wants to do it for practical use, but it's the capability that makes geeks wet their pants.

If given a "minwin" install option, most geeks will try it out, boot to a command line prompt, launch "sol.exe" and go "cool!" and then write a blog post that MS has finally gotten out all the bloat. Then they will reinstall with all the crap actually required to run real programs.

More practically somebody suggested a "remove components required for backward compatibility" option. That's an awfully nebulous concept, but even if MS could do it, they wouldn't, because there would be no noticeable performance increase. I suggest MS try - so that the geeks can do it, report imaginary performance increases in their blogs (even though half their programs don't work), and then reinstall the backwards compatibility components so that their programs work again.

Luckily MS doesn't listen to geek blogs when deciding product features. Most people could give two craps about slimming down Vista - all they want it to do is run their programs.

actually, the last paragraph of my comment is

Vista is the only windows so far I haven't hated, but 2k8 is the first version where it starts entering my list of favorite operating systems.

Edited 2008-05-30 15:58 UTC

"
While the internet geeks cry for more uninstall options, how successful has Windows-N been in EU?
"

Would that be the Windows version where they removed features but then still sold it at the same price on the shelf along side the regular version then claimed N was a flop because everyone chose the other box? Would that be the Windows N failure in the EU market you refer too?

What i mean is that people want what they are already getting, they want as little control panel configuration as possible, let alone having to go out on the web and download something new.

The people who complain about the lack of vista modularity are not the target audience of the sku. It has nothing to do with the ability to ship it, because it exists in 2k8. The point of my post is that they should ship a stripped down 2k8 for the geeks and charge the same price as the home version.

I wouldn't mind if MS had a "Developer SKU" or something like that, which had as little cruft as possible. Probably distributed solely through its MSDN subscription service. That would make the geeks happy, without confusing customers.

Would that be the Windows version where they removed features but then still sold it at the same price on the shelf along side the regular version then claimed N was a flop because everyone chose the other box? Would that be the Windows N failure in the EU market you refer too?

Did you forget it was EU that ordered MS to set the same price for both versions?

Anyway, if I wanted Windows without Media Player, I would not care that other Windows, with Media Player, is priced the same. Why would I? I'd simply buy the one without it because I wanted/needed Windows with no media player.

So yes, Windows N is something no end customer really wants.. Microsoft's competitors are different story. Don't confuse those two groups.

Edited 2008-05-30 21:33 UTC

Was it the EU that required MS sell a crippled Windows (by comparison to there existing line) for the same price? Ha.. If so, I'd missed that bit of information.

Maybe MS should have retained tehre media player, included uninstall and provided optional installs of competing media players.

I work on the Windows Kernel and I can tell you that no piece of NT that actively snoops on what you're doing and tries to protect content-proucers' rights. There are a few features (I can think of 3 of them), which make implementing a DRM system in user programs and drivers a little easier, but none of them have a performance impact when not in use.

Here's one that actually helps performance: Protected Processes are created as a unit from kernel mode, unlike the normal processes in older versions of Windows, where they are created piecemeal through cross-address-space writes. The new method is actually faster, so all process creation goes through the new path (just without the protected process flag).

//sarcasm;
Phooey on your facts. Winblows! MicroShaft! Big Brother! etc. etc. etc.
//sarcasm;

It's easy to make Window sound bad when you make things up.

Have you ever, ever heard of ANYONE being unable to play a non-DRM'd media file on a Windows PC? Of course not. The only DRM lives in the *PLAYER* - and it only applies when you buy DRM'd content. If you don't want DRM, don't buy any DRM'd content. Simple as that.

Of course the kernel hasn't got anything to do with DRM. How about you think for a second before posting your mindless Linux propaganda?

Edited 2008-05-31 17:10 UTC

Yeah right. And lose one of the most central ways to gouge their customers for more $? Come on. Windows servers, in their standard editions, can barely take advantage of most modern hardware until you drop another $1500-$3000 dollars.

As I mentioned in another post, I've had crappy nVidia drivers crash quite frequently while playing games. The driver restarted successfully, though the game was dead. Never had to reboot as a result. These days though my nVidia drivers don't crash any longer.