Black Screen of Death Not Microsoft's Fault

Barence follows up to the ongoing Black Screen of Death Saga by saying "Microsoft says reports of 'Black Screen of Death' errors aren't caused by Windows Updates, as claimed by a British security firm. The software giant claims November's Windows Updates didn't alter registry keys in the way described by Prevx, which said that the Microsoft Patches caused PCs to boot with just a black screen and a Windows Explorer window. Microsoft is now blaming the problem on malware. Prevx has issued a grovelling apology on its own blog."

Comments

Actually yes (but no). OS X is an excellent model

[SuperKendall]

What do you want them to replace it with? hundreds of .conf files scattered randomly about the filesystem, with no standard format?

After having used Linux and Windows and OS X systems for years, OS X does this right.

Yes there are "hundreds of conf files". But they are not scattered around, they are all in ~/Library/Preferences.

And they are usually named via the company name + app convention, like com.apple.mail.

And as opposed to being in "no standard format", they are all plist files (which are basically XML).

So it's easy to find where they are, easy to figure out what plist file belongs to what, and easy to edit or remove them as needed. If there is corruption (which I have never actually seen in practice) it would be limited to a single file - and an app encountering a preference file it could not read would simply replace it with a new default version. You would at worst lose a few custom settings for one app - and even then only as long as it took you to pull a backup of that single file out of Time Machine, since it's easy to restore the preferences for a single application from any backup.

However, I have to add that even if you went with a Linux system where the conf files are scattered all over in many different forms, I can say with confidence it is still 100% better than the nightmare of the registry. In practice the files are very easy to edit regardless of format, it's really only the question of the location that gets annoying.