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Longhorn: Fewer BSODs, More RSODs

Posted by timothy on from the more-colors-still-available dept.

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."

4 of 573 comments (clear)

  1. Re:wtf is a really bad error? by Spoing · · Score: 4, Interesting
    What exactly is a really bad error?

    Well, if they follow IEEE, US Military, SEI CMM, and other related standards 'really bad' is a 'critical'/'show stopper' roughly defined as 'System can not perform a necessary function or data loss occurs'. One step below that is 'high' meaning basically 'problem can be avoided, though it's a PITA'.

    Critical errors can be categorized from 'system or application crashes before it can be used completely but no data loss occurs' (bad) to 'system silently corrupts data' (nasty).

    If you want better definitions, check the specs for any of the above and look for a rating system called "Severity levels". (Note: not the same as priority levels.) Typically there are 4 levels of severity.

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  2. Just an educated guess... by pVoid · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Triggering a BSOD from kernel mode is quite easy actually. The most common BSOD I personally have seen is the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL one. This is actually akin to an assertion failure, because if you call a function which requires IRQL_PASSIVE at anything but the passive level IRQ level, you will get a BSOD, even if the call would not have resulted in a page fault or anything.

    So there's actually a lot of BSODs that are 'preventative' in nature. That is, the kernel says "uh oh, that call should never have been made, the system *might* become unstable, shut it *all* down before any real damage is done".

    Then there's "Boot disk not found", or "Boot disk failure", which are in fact real serious, because it's the end of the line for the machine.

    Maybe they've broken down errors that are likely Kernel driver programming mistakes, and errors that indicate the system is severely damaged.

  3. Changing the Color by freakmn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Actually, it isn't in the registry, it's in system.ini. I haven't been able to verify whether this works, as the computer I'm on hasn't had a BSOD since I got it. I take good care of it.

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  4. How much have you gotten BSOD'ed recently. by AlexMax2742 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been seeing a lot less BSOD's in general since using 2K and XP.

    In Windows 98, I would run the comptuer for a few days, and for no reason it would just start being slow and throwing random BSOD's at me.

    Since using 2K and XP, I've seen a few recently, but they're all realated to a piece of faulty hardware that I've been too lazy to replace. Other than that, I can't reacall seeing a single BSOD in years on a computer of my own.

    I'm honestly asking people. Have you run into BSOD's that really truely was 2000's/XP's fault instead of being some sort of hardware fuckup?

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