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Lessons In Hardware / OS Troubleshooting

Posted by kdawson on from the feels-so-good-when-i-stop dept.

Esther Schindler writes "We like to imagine that every Microsoft OS installation will work just as well as the company promises. When things don't work out, identifying and remedying the case of failure can be time-consuming and frustrating. This lesson in how to determine why Windows 7 didn't install may help you troubleshoot a problem of your own, and save you from a Lost Weekend. Maybe you'll find this account useful all on its own. But the real key here is that the author is Ed Tittel — who's written over 100 books. If this hardware geek spends days solving a CPU-meets-Windows 7 problem, what chance do mere mortals have?"

2 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. You're Kidding by nmb3000 · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is front-page news for Slashdot now? Here's the sum total of TFA:

    • Guy tries to install 64-bit Windows 7 on a machine previously running 32-bit Windows 7
    • Install fails over and over again
    • He replaces hardware components with no luck until he swaps out the CPU
    • Windows installs but is unstable
    • Worthless ASUS BIOS automatic "optimizers" cause stability problems (surprise!)
    • With BIOS settings changed to sane values Windows is stable

    Wow, color me impressed!

    How are "mortals" supposed to figure it out? I guess they buy a PC from Dell because everything in that article qualifies as "no duh" for system builders.

    --
    "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
    /)
  2. Re:actually by Fallingcow · · Score: 4, Informative

    Do what I do--run Windows, put Linux in a VM. Virtual Box is free, robust, and easy to use, or there's always VMWare.

    Run the VM full screen and you can forget you're not running it natively, so long as you don't need to do anything in 3D or very processor intensive (video encoding, for example). Drop to Windows if you need a Windows app (say, a recent version of Photoshop or real MSOffice) or to play games. Plus, if your chosen distro decides to make horrible decisions that cause massive audio breakage (Ubuntu.... *glower*) you can still listen to music or watch Youtube videos in Windows without rebooting.

    Another plus is that your Linux installation is all in a single file that you can back up or transfer very easily.

    I find that this works far better than dual booting. Saves disk space, saves time. I felt kind of crappy at first for making Linux a second-class citizen on my machine, but this works so much better that I wish I'd done it years ago--though I supposed high clocked multi-core processors and multi-gigabyte RAM sticks weren't commonplace back then, so the experience might not have been so nice.