A recent ZDNet article is written by the erstwhile author of a “troubleshooting Windows” book who is sometimes so stymied by mysterious Windows stability problems that he isn’t sure he can write a useful book. The article covers a recent “hangs for no reason” issue that required trial and error and a plethora of included and third party utilities to diagnose and fix.
The good news is that after running WinDoctor–which said it was able to fix all the errors–the machine has been running for 15 hours without crashing. This is much better than when it routinely crashed between 3 and 5 minutes after booting.
Good news?? Man this guy has never tried a proper OS like debian.
Running WinDoctor might as well destroy your registry. And then what?
Running WinDoctor might as well destroy your registry. And then what?
Then you breaj out your backup. No matter what os you are running you should ALWAYS back up.
Good news?? Man this guy has never tried a proper OS like debian.
Running WinDoctor might as well destroy your registry. And then what?
Yeah, and an unexpected power outage might as well destroy your /etc directory, since Debian stable with the recommended 2.2 kernel lacks support for robust journaling filesystems (ext2 doesn’t recover from unexpected interuptions very gracefully at times)
Stop trolling. Even Debian can crash and become unstable when improperly configured (certain XFree86 drivers come to mind). Look at both base installs and you’ll find them to be approximately equal in stability.
Sounds like an advertisement for Norton to me…
You pay for an os to have these problems? At least Linux can be acquired for free. I expect some problems with something that is free. But Windows costs $$. To sit there and expect to pay for windows and then pay for 3rd party programs and say well thats ok thats normal. Man the best thing about Linux is that it is all in one usually and if you need something you go and download it. But to sit there according to the article and just accept this stuff from M$ is part of most users problems. They have gone used to this stuff and they dont even question anymore. If you want to go and just accept this kind of thing go ahead. Just realize you are being nickeled and dimed over and over again. Its your money being thrown out the window go for it if you wish. This is not for me.
I’m surprised that he doesn’t have a hardware problem; I think he does.I’ve seen windows install over bad hardware and that’s when the fun begins.It may be a part that is barely working but is passed up during the install; especially memory. When you start pulling out parts to find the offending hardware then you have to worry about activation/wpa files.
The good thing about Linux is that it won’t tolerate bad hardware during the install.
As for OS’s crashing, I’ve seen them all crash; just some crash less than others…
I am pretty fed up with this hype…
I have been using NT4, W2K and XP each for several years, and the only times i had crashes or blue screens were caused by crappy hardware or crappy drivers.
I run XP pro on my home pc (dual PIII) and laptop (Acer PIII) and i have never had problems, except with a driver conflict between 2 drivers.
sure you can go to crap-r-us and buy an overclocked athlon with a small heatrsink and a bad power supply and shitty RAM, but that does not mean windows XP is bad.
somehow i always wonder how people are able to screw their pc’s. the difference between linux and XP in that regards is that you have to know much more about pc’s to be able to do something with linux, which makes linux installs more stable presumably.
but i have had lots of linux crashes too.
with my pc, its nautilus in mandrake 9.1 that crashes every 5 seconds. don’t tell me i need to patch my kernel or switch distro’s. it should work out of the box. compared to windows explorer nautilus doesn’t stand a chance.
regards,
Int.
Seeing all the Windows vs. Linux arguments on this site makes me want to vomit.
– J
Leaving things on the registry is not Windows XP fault. The programs he installed are to blame. A good program would include things in the registry and when uninstalled, remove every line from the registry. So saying Windows XP is to blame is incorrect and coming from a guy who “writes about software” is a shame.
Essentially the article is an ad for Norton Systemworks.
It’s worrying to see that defective registry entries can cause the OS to randomly crash, I guess having all the computers configuration entries in one file makes it impossible to find out which application’s configuration is causing the problem.
He does make one good point though… When a computer starts behaving in a flakey way, where do you start looking?
It could be almost anything, from a piece of malware to a misplaced motherboard standoff.
Unfortunately, as there are no debugging symbols in Windows, it cannot generate proper bug reports that make tracking down internal problems easier..
I would say that a complete wipe and re-install should be the first, not last resort when the computer is totally borked. Messing around with ‘System Restore’ or an upgrade to ‘XP-pro’ (Idiot! Doesn’t he know that that is a minefield even with a working computer?) just wastes time.
Needing expensive third party software to get it working is just ludicrous.
Windows is not designed for the long haul. The best solution is to keep an image of your Windows OS drive on another disk, and just mirror it back when Windows has rotted to the point of being unusable. Takes about five minutes to get a fresh clean install with all your apps, and works every time.
I admire his bravery in writing a book about trouble-shooting Windows, but I don’t have any confidence in his technical ability to do so.
I use both Linux and Windows 2000, and find both to be very stable, but when the shit hits the fan, Linux is generally easier to troubleshoot.
Get a Mac man. Simple install, drag to where ever you want to install. To uninstall, drag to trash bin and its gone. Once again, Macs come out on top when it comes to ease of use. No extra files that you don’t want.
Leaving things on the registry is not Windows XP fault.
No… It’s Bill’s fault.
Think about it – there is 3rd party software, such as RemoveIT, that will monitor your software installation, and undo the registry entries when you uninstall.
Is microsoft is too technically challenged to do the same? They have jammed software into XP in order to destroy the competion (firewalls, cd-writing, …) – why couldn’t they devote the same enegery to making the registry cleaner?
Imagine that – no support for a fundamental subsystem of their operating system! Make you feel all warm and fuzzy about the more high-tech aspects of the operating system.
I had similar problems until recently. My XP SP1 system started to spontaneously reboot for no apparent reason. Nothing in the logs and I even tried the “send an error report to MS” to see if I might get an answer. Nada… nothing. Since I write technical articles as a sideline, I tend to use my system pretty heavily and had installed a beta of VMWare 4. I didn’t think this was the problem, but I uninstalled it anyway. No go.
Away I went with an XP repair — it failed and failed hard. To a point where my system wouldn’t boot even into safe mode. Now — I used both Windows and Linux and I like ’em both. I haven’t run into too many problems that really stump me, but this one did.
Since I had some deadlines and no time to completely reinstall XP and apps, I went back to my older XP system (sans SP1) and running VMWare 3 which was fine for my needs at that point. I figured I’d get back to the new system later. Lo and behold, after about 2 hours, it bit it as well. I realized that this was simply too much of a coincidence. The older system has a temperature guage. Yeah… WAY hot. I knew my room at home was hot, but I really didn’t think it was THAT hot.
After I got past my deadlines, I reinstalled XP on a new drive — I was planning to do so anyway — and ran it with a fan blowing into the case. I also installed a temperature guage. No problems since.
Lesson: I’ve never had heat problems before, but I’ve found that running a bunch of VMs on 2 drives really heats up the processor and can cause problems. During hot weather, use a fan or buy a case with 7 fans which is what I ultimately ended up doing.
Lesson #2: Windows (XP at least) seldomly just “starts dying”. It’s not a bad OS at all.
>Leaving things on the registry is not Windows XP fault.
Yes, but normal software should not be able to make your OS crash!
Only new device drivers should have the privilege to do this, normal programs should not.
Both Windows and Linux gives usually too much priviledge to applications, IMHO.
I think that a big number of apps should only need read/write priviledge to their own subdirectories, read priviledge for shared libraries and configuration management files and that’s all..
***************
Reply to Interfacer:
There is a BIG difference between an application crash and an OS crash!
If an application crash too much, it isn’t a big deal: either update the app, reinstall it or use another application which do the same thing (especially in Linux where free apps don’t cost too much :-)).
An OS crash is much, much worse.
*************
My own opinion on the subject is that WindowsXP is quite stable but it is a “black box” if there is a problem you have very few possibility to fix it, which make me feels quite unsecure..
Quite often my PC wouldn’t stop correctly and I’m obliged to press the off button for 3sec to make it stop. What is the application which is causing this?
I have no idea.. Thanks Microsoft!
Sometimes on Linux, I misconfigured it which caused problems but I’ve always been able to troubleshoot the problems easily thanks to the log files and the simple Unix design.
I’d differentiate between two kinds of instabilities that people commonly see: Hangups of the kernel (aka Blue Screens on Windows) and broken system configurations, usually due to a broken installer. While Windows NT/2K/XP are pretty stable wrt kernel hangups, the second problem is still there.
You could say that it’s not Microsoft’s fault since it’s other people’s installers hosing the system, but I’ve never seen this kind of problem as persistently on a Linux distribution, and would be surprised if the amount of work going into the installers of commercial Windows packages wasn’t a lot higher than that going into packaging Linux software. So something seems to be wrong with the way software is installed and configured on Windows (the registry springs to mind).
And no, this guy did not have a hardware problem, unless Norton Systemworks can somehow repair hardware (in which case I’d immediately buy it
).
Windows crashes are mainly caused by applications (and then mainly 3rd party).
When you die, it isn’t always caused by braindamage, right?
I don’t even bother when an install of Windows gets messed up. It’s not worth the time. It takes much less time to just wipe the drive and reinstall everything than it does to try and diagnose which part of the software is busted. If you do the format and reinstall, then it’s hardware or a serious virus. Plain and simple.
If you do the format and reinstall and you still have problems, then it’s hardware or a serious virus. Plain and simple.
“Leaving things on the registry is not Windows XP fault.”
This is true, because the Registry is _Microsoft’s_ fault.
is a giant joke. This guy can rarely think his way out of his own house.
Bad RAM is the cause of alot crashes.
Why do we put up with it !?
It is not Win XP VS Mac X
It is not P5 VS G5
It is not Linux vs Win vs Mac X vs <your os>
It is the fact that we do not want to
pay more and have some small slow downs that you
may get with full ECC ram.
Realy windows is better no linux is, anyway Windows has the easy to use facter down, & linux has the security/stability. Mac took BSD & made it easy. The prob. with XP, is well the firewall sucks, it only blocks incoming trafic. MS has billions of dollars, but they can’t make a stable secure os!! Come on the linux community does their work for free & linux is stable & secure, OMG hard to bleive, I know.
It’s funny when people start giving excuses for a > $200 Operating System that has so many problems. Then they bring up the stupid logic, “But Linux too crashes” Yeah, tell which OS doesn’t. The point is for a $200 Operating System, I don’t expect Windows to be compared to Linux, let alone expect it to crash. I mean Linux is more open, more secure, more stable, in my experience much faster than windows is. If Linux had a commercial price tag, it should be selling for $1000. But it’s not.
Regards,
Mystilleef
From personal experience, anything from symantec has a high probablity of hosing the system. It’s like a law of nature.
I spend most of the day troubleshooting Laptops, and I agree that wiping the hard drive is usually the best idea, but there are times when the system needs to be brought back to life because of unbacked up data. Familiarity with the system, meaning knowing how it works, will allow somone to fix the problem 90% of the time on the first try.
I can’t comment on linux, except that it feels unresponsive, since I don’t use it on a regular basis.
I’d like to know the name of his book, so I can not recommend it to people.
>>
but i have had lots of linux crashes too.
with my pc, its nautilus in mandrake 9.1 that crashes every 5 seconds. don’t tell me i need to patch my kernel or switch distro’s. it should work out of the box. compared to windows explorer nautilus doesn’t stand a chance.
>>
Are you saying the the OS crashes, or Nautilus crashes, or that Nautilus crashes Liniux? I would believe that Nautilus crashes on mdk, not that Linux crashes because of Nautilus….
You should make the distinction between the OS crashing and and an application crashing.
You’re right in that Nautilus shouldn’t crash every 5 minutes, and it should work out of the box. Update your system with the mdk control center and bitch to them. They deserve to hear it. There is a version of Nautilus that doesn’t crash every 5 minutes!
I’d like to point out that I’ve NEVER had kernel crash with MDK 9.1.
I’d like to point out that I’ve NEVER had kernel crash with MDK 9.1.
I’ll had that, in two years of using Linux, I’ve never had a kernel crash. I don’t even know what it looks like! I did have X freeze up on me a couple of times before NVIDIA got their act together and made a stable driver, but even then I could usually connect from another machine and restart X.
“Making Linux More like Windows than Windows”
and “When Windows Goes Wrong” on the same page.
You know, I don’t thing I have to say anything more.
This so-called article IMO appeared as an Ad for Norton System Works, which IMHO is one bit of software that you don’t install, if you want a clean running system…
Out of the hundreds of NSW installs I have seen, 95% made the computer run worse, and I can only think of 1 case where it actually saved the system (by backing up some documents in the background, which could be backupped before wiping the HDD)…
In recent years the level of stablity of Win2K/XP and Linux are on par if run on good hardware. It’s the sh*tty hardware that plagues the consumer world that makes both Win and Linux crash (talking OS not app)… which IMO was the guys problem, (I would say bad RAM, followed by chipset/mobo).
I, on behalf of my colleagues in the technical support industry, would like to thank Microsoft for creating such a pile of unreliable junk. We all make good incomes and we are thankful to the Great God of Abundant Problems, Microsoft!
Just as my fellows in the auto industry thank their kind and benevolent Gods — GM, Ford, and Chrysler — for making such low quality cars. Because then they get to offer expensive replacement parts and insane labor fees to fix simple product design defects.
Product breakdown is the American Way.
Make the consumer pay twice, three times, or more.
Keep the money rolling in.
What really gets my blood boiling is that in Windows you need to use the system with Administrative priveledges for half the bloody software out there. Want too burn a CD, can’t do it unless your an administrator, want to play certain games, can’t do it unless your an administrator. Want to use most other apps aside from MS Office. At least in Linux if you need administrative/root privileges you can get access to them through the terminal. Makes life much easier and alows you to generally run a more secure system under normal restricted user logins.
Now the registry. What a god aweful mess. Great concept with a really bad implementation but that is the same for Microsofts file directories. I’m not sayin Linux is any better but OS’s need to rethink their file directory structures and lay them out in a simple, logical manor. You know Drivers under an Drivers folder within a general OS folder and the driver them selves under type (i.e. display) and company name (although not necessary for displays on most systems great for multiple network card installs etc.). Program files under their respective program folders similar to MS has it now but with stricter structure rules and app drivers within the program folder respective to the app so it is easier to rid the bloody things when you un-install your apps.
At the moment both Windows and Linux are a mess in this regards. Both need improvement to simplify the underlying file structure and Windows, its’ registry.
Um. Last time I checked you just (shift) right click a program and select “Run as” in windows to do the same thing…
1) People scream about other people running Windows XP on cheap crappy hardware, yet, isn’t that the *whole* argument for using PC’s and Windows because of the apparent “low cost”? if one were to buy a quality PC, and yes, there is a premium paid, wouldn’t one just simply be better off and buy a Mac instead?
2) People who give Coursey a hardtime, need people be remineded that compared to the average user, he is a genius.
The average user, who makes up 85% of the desktop PC world are morons.
They know diddly squat about computers, how to use applications, they simply sit there, click ‘n drool and stumble through their work each day hoping they don’t do something stupid.
I’ve given up on the hope that people will actually learn how to use a computer. The chances that 85% of people will see the writting on the wall and upgrade their skills is *VERY* low. When they are made unemployed they then scream to all and sundry about this great “unjustice” because they were to lazy to get clued into upskilling themselves.
3) I have run Linux, anyone who says Nautilus crashes every 5minutes is simply lying throught their teeth, having run it as part of a distro (Redhat Linux 9) and built from scratch (FreeBSD), I really can’t work out why people would make such an obvious lie.
4) It appears that every XFree86 crash can be traced right back to a dodgy Nvidia driver and motherboard. How about hint, don’t buy an Nvidia card or that particular dodgy motherboard. Having run XFree86 before, if the driver is opensource as with the case of the Matrox Drivers, then one will receive superior statbility than that of Nvidia who have this pariod idea that some how people will “steal” their ideas if they opensourced their drivers.
5) Why do people install Norton System Works, infact, why do people use *ANY* symantec or McAfee products? Both are the central problem in ANY computer issue. If you do need to run an anti-virus, buy a copy of Kaspersky. It is lean, mean and doesn’t bring down the whole machine.
6) When one pays AUS$500 for a FULL version of Windows XP Professional (OEM’s versions don’t count as purchasing them without a significant piece of hardware is in violation of the EULA), one expects the quality to exceed that of Linux, which is maintained by a small group of hackers and distro employees.
How can Microsoft truely justify THAT price tag when the competition don’t even charge that amount. MacOS X in australia is only $230 incl GST. Compare THAT to AUS$500 for Windows XP Professional. You would think with the economies of scale, Windows *SHOULD* be cheaper, but it isn’t.
– fdisk
.. and then installing a Linux distro of choice.
Yeah, and an unexpected power outage might as well destroy your /etc directory, since Debian stable with the recommended 2.2 kernel lacks support for robust journaling filesystems (ext2 doesn’t recover from unexpected interuptions very gracefully at times)
Haha.. so why didn’t you install the 2.4 kernel that also came with stable, if you wanted to use features only available in 2.4? Or do you like to give yourself unnecessary pain?
Haha.. so why didn’t you install the 2.4 kernel that also came with stable, if you wanted to use features only available in 2.4? Or do you like to give yourself unnecessary pain?
Actually, I don’t even like Debian, but last I knew they recommended the 2.2 kernel for Debian Stable, although you could use 2.4
I was using that as an example, because the first poster said something to the effect of “just use Debian, you won’t have ANY problems”
Personally, I’m more of a FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Mandrake/RedHat/Slackware person myself…LOL
after installing direct X 9 it had to reinstall the whole thing, because it left my normally superstable 2k box unusable…
And yeah you guess right dx9 cannot get uninstalled… What a OS
… No. I tried several freeware tools, they didn’t cope with dx9 too.
Thanx MS, God bless my 2k box without dx9 after a fresh reinstall
PS:I know gfxdriver has to support it, I guess it does…
Out of the hundreds of NSW installs I have seen, 95% made the computer run worse, and I can only think of 1 case where it actually saved the system (by backing up some documents in the background, which could be backupped before wiping the HDD)…
but 100% of them make the user think that NSW is helping them. I have repeatedly told one friend of mine that he needs to remove it from his system if he wants it to ever be stable, but he won’t listen. He asked me to upgrade his computer to XP, I told him to pick up XP and more RAM, and then I upgraded it and removed NSW when it told me the version he had installed wouldn’t work in XP. Two days later he asked what happened to NSW, I told him, he went out and bought a new version (ARGH), and his computer hasn’t been stable since (oh, and he never did buy the RAM, though the computer worked great until he installed NSW).
In recent years the level of stablity of Win2K/XP and Linux are on par if run on good hardware. It’s the sh*tty hardware that plagues the consumer world that makes both Win and Linux crash (talking OS not app)… which IMO was the guys problem, (I would say bad RAM, followed by chipset/mobo).
I seriously doubt he really had any hardware problems, as it seemed that reinstalling NSW was all it took (because we all know that reinstalling any application will usually clean up it’s own mess, at least for a little while, NSW is no different). If he had just left it off his system, he probably would’ve had no problems.
The only Norton product I will ever use on my own systems is the Antivirus software, and even that I rarely use (and never run in the background, it causes at least as many problems when run that way as any of the other products in NSW).
Wow what a numbnut. There are so many things wrong with this article i don’t know where to begin. First lets start with his Norton ad. Norton Systemworks was not formally Norton Utilities, NS includes NU and other Norton programs. Looks like he doesn’t even know the software hes taughting. Also he complains that MS does not offer a registry fixer, well look a little harder you dingleberry, they do offer one. Its called RegClean. Someone should slap this guy. This guy also doesn’t sound like he knows how to install and operating system. If you know what you are doing, you can install WinXP over and keep your apps, i did many times. This guy needs to stop using his software to j3rk off with.
If Linux had a commercial price tag, it should be selling for $1000. But it’s not.
Wow…you’re a tougher nut than SCO. Come on…$1000?? There are commercial versions of Linux..Lindows, Lycoris, etc. All at least cheaper than Windows.
“compared to windows explorer nautilus doesn’t stand a chance.”
With Mandrake 9.1, use Kde 3.1. The Konqueror file manager/web browser is very stable and faster than Nautilus. It never caused a system freeze. Never.
You can also use Konqueror in Gnome, but KDE’s integration is better in Mandrake. KDE is overall better in my humble opinion.
The best thing that ever happened to OSes is the registry. Now you don’t have to mess around with a config file for each application. This is to enforce policy, w/c Linux lacks. Imagine maintaining a config file for each app in Linux! It’s a mess. Actually Linux is a mess and a hack. If Linux is not free, I won’t use it.
Now respect my opinion, otherwise, don’t bother replying.
Affordable hardware doesn’t equal crappy hardware and expensive hardware doesn’t equal quality hardware.