Lessons In Hardware / OS Troubleshooting

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?"

Comments

actually

[nomadic]

We like to imagine that every Microsoft OS installation will work just as well as the company promises.

Actually around here people like to imagine that every MS OS installation will miserably crash, because then they strut around feeling good about using Linux.

Re:Sooooo

[SilverHatHacker]

This is Slashdot. Windows is always to blame.

You're Kidding

[nmb3000]

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.

Re:You're Kidding

[GrumpySteen]

You should be impressed. No mere mortal would ever look at computer and think "let's replace random parts until it starts working!" This guy is clearly some sort of magical god of electronic troubleshooting. Quite possibly with a unicorn for a sidekick.

Re:You're Kidding

[Gadget_Guy]

More evidence he's a "script-kiddy": He uses Microsoft's "excellent" Windows 7 USB DVD Download Tool, instead of simply using diskpart to create a partition on the stick and copying the files over from the ISO.

Yeah, right. He writes books on Windows 7, but he shouldn't try the official way of installing from USB. Because that would mean that he had used the tools that he wanted to write about. Shame on him!

Re:You're Kidding

[GrumpySteen]

Maybe if he had switched to a 128 bit power supply. That's twice what you need for a 64 bit processor, right?

Re:What I love here is the part where he

[Wrath0fb0b]

just rolls right on past the fact that, if what he was installing was -- oh, say -- a Linux distribution, he wouldn't have an opaque "I'm uncompressing files" thermometer, he'd have real progress status messages, with, y'know, *parameters* and stuff, and -- unlike me this morning with my boss's iPhone -- a hope of actually figuring out what's broken.

And what specific parameter in any Linux installation error message is likely to point towards the CPU being defective? Most of them would be generic hardware-has-shit-itself errors (DMA failures, null pointer exceptions, hash failures) that could mean any of the cpu/motherboard/ram/psu/hdd are defective. It's impossible, even in principle, for any installer to be able to pinpoint with specificity what hardware is fucked.

Just for lols, I wish you would get modded up (me too, of course :-P) so that the OP can install $DISTRO on that original setup and see what error we get and whether it exactly pinpoints the cpu or whether it spits out a generic hardware error.

ES CPU

[tftp]

If this hardware geek spends days solving a CPU-meets-Windows 7 problem, what chance do mere mortals have?"

You need first to show me a "mere mortal" who has, and uses, an engineering sample CPU. There is a very good reason why -ES parts are marked as such - because they have bugs. And those bugs will be a problem sooner or later.

So the whole sob story can be reduced to this. The guy runs software on a prototype hardware, and the software crashes. In other breaking news, dog bites man.

Re:Assigning blame doesn't alway help

[PopeRatzo]

I didn't read the article or the summary. The title was plenty.

Interesting idea, but not the same...

[Mathinker]

One of the reasons I use Linux is that, currently, it is much more secure than Windows, given my personal use scenario.

Yes, if I were a specialist in securing Windows that might not be the case, but I'm not. Yes, if equivalent amount of effort was invested to break the security of casual users of Linux compared to that invested in breaking Windows, again, Linux might not be any more secure than Windows (well, with Linux, there are distros where I can always boot off of USB and then not save any changes, so until Microsoft offers me the same functionality there's little chance that I could use it in as secure a fashion as I can use Linux).

Running Linux in a VM under Windows just wouldn't "cut it" for me. Sorry.

I'd do it the other way around

[Viol8]

INstall linux and run Windows in a VM. When your windows install gets infected/hosed with a virus/malware/whatever it could well mess up your linux VM machine and make it inrecoverable but if you install Windows in a VM and run on top of linux the worst that can happen is the VM gets hosed.