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Longhorn: Fewer BSODs, More RSODs
Jan Theofel writes "Windows Loghorn will present you less BSOD. Joi Ito reports that Windows Longorn will get additional ROSD (red screen of death) for 'really bad errors.' So you will get less BSOD but some new RSOD. You can find a ROSD screenshot in a virtual machine in his weblog entry."
Now people will have heart attacks instead of just saying, "What the heck?" and getting frustrated.
Blues (and greens) are generally more soothing/comforting (which is why blue or green are most frequently favorite colors), whereas reds are more jarring (which is why it's used for stop signs, warning labels, etc.).
If you are seeing BSODs almost daily, you either have faulty hardware or some seriously buggy drivers. Honestly folks, XP, and even 2000, BSOD very rarely.
Well, yeah. Evidently, some people lack the knowledge/skill to set up an XP box correctly.
Red screens are just too agressive. An error message already is very irritating, why the hell do we need it to be red ? I'd almost hate the Sarge installer because of that...
It takes a special kind of person to have a WinXP box that bluescreens 'almost daily'.
Thats because your computer by default automatically resets when it gets one.
However I must say the only time I've ever had one on XP was with some faulty ram. And even more impressive the knowledge base artical about the error message was correct in telling me I had bad ram.
A BSOD is a *low level OS error*. It's Windows' equivalent of a kernel panic. It doesn't matter a whit what the shell does because the whole machine will be locked up hard *anyway*.
Which means that although I don't get BSODs very often either, I do get two to three "blank-outs" on a bad day.
I don't know what you're talking about, based on the above, but they don't sound like BSODs. If they really *are* BSODs, and your machine is resetting itself _several times a day_, you have seriously broken hardware and/or drivers. You should get it fixed.
WinXP hides most of its BSOD's. It just restarts explorer. There is an option to make it show when it happens. Most people think I am kidding, but it is true. We had some hardware issues at work that took way longer than it should have to diagnose before our "sysadmin" figured this one out.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
Actually, you can't even presume that. Some manufacturers are especially good at writing drivers that suck, so it's entirely possible that they could ship a laptop with dodgy drivers. The other problem is that a lot of the drivers they ship with aren't written by them - I'm working on an HP laptop with an HP build (stupid) that has Intel, Synaptics & Realtek drivers...
Actually a friend of mine who knows so much about doing weird things with Windows it's scary, has moved his WinXP install across multiple motherboards with different chipsets (via, sis, nForce and Intel). He wrote a small tutorial with lots of pictures on how to do it and it's not exactly hard - I don't know the link off-hand.
It's all in the preparation, if you don't install Generic IDE/Chipset drivers (Windows is smart enough to use the correct drivers without requiring the generic ones when it installs) Windows can't read from the HDD and obviously fails to boot. Just like if you removed Generic IDE chipset support from your Kernel and tried to boot it on another system it would most likely fail.
One thing worth mentioning here that the Mac zealots might huff and puff about. Microsoft manages to create a pretty stable environment when the hardware is a constant. People who mod their Xbox of course sometimes have some issues, but that's not surprising. Mac heads always talk about how MS couldn't write software that doesn't crash and Apple software is superior, but Apple has the advantage of only writing software for their own hardware which is much easier to do.