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charlieg wrote: Microsoft's pathetic excuse for an operating system.
I have been using Windows for something approaching 30 years, and have had very few problems with it. Rather than "pathetic excuse", I would say it is an excellent operating system and can largely be used without problems by any non-technical person.
However, should you start to mess with it (as I have done once or twice) do not be surprised if it crashes occasionally.
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Richard MacCutchan wrote: I have been using Windows for something approaching 30 years
Had you mentioned the 30 odd years of *nix usage before that, you'd be showing your age. Jeez, man. That was close. 
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Sadly I came to Unix rather late in life, in fact after I started on Windows. The previous 25 years were spent working on mainframes.
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Install Debugging Tools for Windows and use WinDbg to open dump file after BSOD. Don't believe to any BSOD diagnosis site.
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Well off to WinDbg it is. I agree with the assessment of the other sites - huge amounts of adds and "we suggest you download easydriverfix.exe". As for Microsoft's sites, they are just a shadow of their past filled with ridiculous MS responses.
As for Windows 10 itself - the most stable OS for me was Windows 7, and I still believe that Windows 10 was more marketing than anything else. I cite the asinine decision to forcibly reboot computers to update them. Even running W10 Pro, I still see the same issues that people have been fighting since Windows 8. At any given time, the ntoskrnl will be sucking up 10% of my cpu. Recovering from sleep mode is a guaranteed BSOD bomb waiting to detonate. And God help you if you get happy with USB devices. These are chronic issues that have existed in Windows for years, and yet the OS is still vulnerable to the whims of 3rd parties.
Even now after all these years, the most likely way to reset your machine to a stable state is to re-install Windows. Don't even get me started on its security issues.
Anyway off to WinDbg....
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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charlieg wrote: Even now after all these years, the most likely way to reset your machine to a stable state is to re-install Windows
I would make the case that this is true for any OS, unless you're intimately familiar with its internals and know where to look for crap that doesn't uninstall itself cleanly.
There's always one recurring theme I see whenever people bring me a system that's in such a bad state that there's no recovery option but to nuke/reinstall: Users have installed so much software of dubious origin over years and they can't identify a quarter of the items in the Add/Remove Programs list. The first thing to do given a brand new machine is to remove all the third-party bundleware. I've had fewer problems manually cleaning viruses off of people's machines.
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I've only had one BSOD on Windows 10, and it was caused by, ... wait for it ..., a bad driver! It really was! Vendor site had an updated driver and haven't had a problem since.
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I've had the opposite happening to me.
Laptop nagging me to update the drivers, did it and it bluescreened on startup. It was hell to rollback.
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charlieg wrote: what are your preferred sites?
Amongst these you will easy your burden.[^]
| Ravings en masse^ |
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| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Funny you should be advocating for Debian. I've just installed 10 in a new VM, and its GUI-based updater ("Software Center", I think?) insists I'm offline and it can't get anything. Yet I'm browsing the web and other systems within my LAN.
I've used plenty of versions before that, and have used plenty more alternative distributions (see below - this is from my Hyper-V host running nothing but Linux VMs)...yet this is the first time I've encountered this, and I frankly I don't know what to do about it.
C:\> (Get-VM).Count
137
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I worked on a product that automated data centers. It ran under that flaky, unreliable, constantly crashing, BSOD producing OS called Windows. It ran for nearly 4 years without being powered off, shut down or rebooted even once. Then the machine was upgraded to a newer version of Windows and continued without issue until I left the company quite a bit later. 
We also had to deal with AS/400s, various Unix and Linux machines and they were, relatively speaking, constantly hanging up or giving problems. In fact, we used our software - running under Windows - to report when these other machines became unresponsive. 
This was a few years ago but I still haven't seen a BSOD except just one about five years ago when some memory hardware failed. 
Sorry, but I don't intend to join your hate-speech club! 
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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I had an old Dell 6520 that lasted me for 5+ years. Then one day it started to BSOD on me at random intervals. the BSOD messages were all different. I checked on the "usual" places for answers the BSOD message but no help. I finally decided to run a memory test, (MemTest86[^]) and low and behold, I had some bad memory. Replaced the memory modules and all was good.
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My preferred solution is a kernel dump and WinDbg. The far most crashes I've diagnosed myself stem from faulty third-party drivers, a couple are extremely specific in being unspecific which indicates hardware failure. I remember one I've seen which was impossible to nail down at first, but dude finally admitted overclocking but couldn't grasp the causal connection between overclocking and kernel panics himself.
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Most BSoD events are now hidden from the user, as ms has followed apple's example of freezing the state of the monitor (apple shows a screenshot) whilst frantically killing and restarting stuff in the background.
The only way to see that anything happened is by checking the error log -- but even that only works sometimes, because the error log always seems to be one of the first things that stop working,
Personally, I'd rather get blue screens; who knows how much worse they make things by trying to hide errors?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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The company IT force upgraded the 7 year computer I was working on from 7 to 10, with zero checks why no indicators ever showed suggesting to upgrade.
Came into work to work one day and "oh, oh! Why is the desktop different. Win 10 upgrade."
Check VS and critical daily tools still worked. Cool.
Enable dual screen strecth. Odd - not finding 2nd monitor.
Odd - not finding graphics card.
Install radeon driver update - crash. but not BSOD crash.
Windows very kindly rolled the change back to using default windows graphics driver without completely falling over.
Issue - dell motherboard driver + some releated graphics driver is not supported for windows 10.
And even better is windows detected such a thing and never prompted to upgrade knowing that the hardware was not supported.
Months go buy, zero mention why I'm not using the 2nd monitor.
There was mentions ages ago that all old hardware would be replaced. Even filled out spreadsheet with computer details indicating serial number and model type which 10 second search would indicate age and if Win 10 supported, and said spreadsheet was used to remotely identify my computer for upgrading.
Suffice to say I started looking up articles on why devs and IT do not get along, wanted to find something regarding how a number of Devs write the software IT use and actually end up with a bunch of knowledge to get their work done which they know why not ... blah ... blah ... blah.
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I am on Windows 7... AKA The Last Stable Build of Windows.
I don't have those problems.
And I wont switch until Microsoft stabilizes Windows 10.
What a gawd awful excuse for an operating system.
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I've been building industrial control systems for a good 20 years now, and all based on the windows platform (okay some embedded stuff out there too), and other than hard disk or power supply failure the systems have been rock solid. I still have some XP machines out there just chugging away, and no one want's to upgrade them, if they are still working.
some machines have user interaction, others don't, I've got one machine (at least) out there that hasn't been restarted in close to 10 years, still ticking away with no issues. honestly the only real troubles I've had were do to system admins and IT people mucking about "tweaking" a system, then i get called out, put everything back the way it was, then they tweak it again, so i get called out again....
STOP TOUCHING THE #### COMPUTER!!! YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING!!!
I've had control system's running on every version of windows since XP, the only true reason of the stability is: no windows updates can be installed, because there is no internet at these facilities 
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Under start date, can we please have the option to select:
• Immediate
• 1 week
• 2 weeks
• 3 weeks
• 4 weeks; or
• Select Start date (allows us to select specific start date)
 
Zen and the art of software maintenance : rm -rf *
Maths is like love : a simple idea but it can get complicated.
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Pfft wait till they ask you to do the weeks to 3 then months to 3 then quarters to 4 and then years in the same control and still want to specify a specific date.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Use QA !
«Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?» T. S. Elliot
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Since the last full moon. Minus weekends and holidays.
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What they're saying is, "I want to easily be able to select now, in 1, 2, 3 or 4 weeks, or a specific date." Doesn't seem like an unreasonable request to me. Many apps offer similar functionality.
/ravi
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So ... a drop down, or set of radio buttons (drop down allows for more flexibility in future) and a tiny bit of code. What's the problem?
Sounds like a very nice little feature that is simple to implement and makes the user's life a load easier ...
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640
Never throw anything away, Griff
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Yes thats what I did. Added a dropdown. Making thier life easier that I am not sure of
Zen and the art of software maintenance : rm -rf *
Maths is like love : a simple idea but it can get complicated.
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Developers who refuse to understand what makes life easier for their users worry me.
It is a perfectly acceptable request, which obviously means "Next Monday", "the Monday after that", etc, and I, at least, can see how that would have value to users.
I suggest that you just do it.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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