[PLUG] Microsoft Does It Again

Anthony Schlemmer aschlemm at attbi.com
Fri Apr 19 17:05:42 UTC 2002


Sadly I see this behavior on my wife's new XP box with IE 5.5. I was 
checking for the latest updates for XP and then boom...The next thing I 
know the system was rebooting. Once XP recovered a little error dialog 
appears saying that Windows had a serious problem and allows some sort 
of error report to be sent to Microsoft.

So now Microsoft can now claim no more BSOD with XP. My wife's system 
has a removable IDE hard drive setup and we also have Win2K running on 
the same hardware. I find Win2K to be far more stable than XP 
professional. I did manage a couple of BSOD with Win2K when I was first 
installing it but since I upgraded the ATI video drivers Win2K has been 
quite stable.

For our firewalling and printer/file sharing Linux and Samba have been 
great for us. We've never have had any problems with any of our Linux 
boxes crashing and we have run them 24/7 since we first setup our 
network.

Tony

On Friday 19 April 2002 08:49 am, you wrote:
> Occasionally, I get an email from CNET about the new articles on
> their website, & usually I delete them after a brief glance. But the
> latest one I received piqued my curiousity:
>
> ``Windows XP Nightmares --
> http://home.cnet.com/software/0-6688749-8-9696202-1.html"
>
> So I had a quick read. The article mentions three big complaints, the
> first being as follows:
>
> ``The nightmare
> From time to time, when I open an Excel spreadsheet, my XP machine
> reboots. There's no warning. The system just hangs for a couple of
> seconds, then the PC starts up as if I had just switched it on or hit
> the reset button. Do ghosts live in this machine, or is Microsoft
> trying to lower the country's productivity?"
>
> And what is the cause? According to CNET, ``Whenever the OS
> encounters a Stop Error--the kind that, in earlier editions of
> Windows, resulted in the dreaded blue screen of death--the system
> automatically reboots." So in other words, since you're going to need
> to reboot anyway, Windows does it for you. And the article explains
> how do disable this in order to see the error message.
>
> Sigh. Since all MS appears capable of doing with this chronic problem
> is to change it's name every few years (once upon a time Windows
> users griped about GPFs), why can't they improve the error messages?
> Add some diagnostic information so that budding techies have a chance
> in hell of figuring this out?
>
> I know, I know, it'd probably give away some MS intellectual property
> if they offerd useful error messages.
>
> Geoff
>
>
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-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at attbi.com




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