Not Cool

[muninnhuginn]

Those scrolling lines of white text on black background. That's the second time in the year or more since I got the beast.

It could just be the heat, of course. But, but, but... I went over to the penguin side to avoid all those blue screens of death.

Comments

[nojay.livejournal.com]

Nearly all Blue Screens of Death in Windows were due to hardware glitches anyway. It's just that most PCs and laptops run Windows so they were the obvious symbol of how bad Windows software was/is and have you tried Linux, a Real Operating System?

I fixed a BSOD-type problem on my main Windows desktop a few weeks ago by pulling a suspect 4GB stick of RAM off the motherboard. That's a device with more than four billion transistors in it, any one of which going wrong for a few nanoseconds could bring my machine down as a piece of essential code or data wouldn't execute properly. Linux, OS/X, DOS, Windows, they could all fail in such circumstances (recovery from such glitches may be automatic but sometimes the effects of the error are just too extreme).

The next generation of PCs will have to have error-correcting memory capability as a core feature now that large amounts of on-board RAM are getting more and more common since there's more chance of a glitch or an outright failure (a memory cell sticking high or low) because of the sheer number of memory cells and the smaller and smaller physical size of the memory cells themselves.

Current uptime on this Windows 8 machine, 13 days and counting. I powered it down last time to reboot after updates and to rejig the hard drives, not because of a BSOD.

[muninnhuginn]

That was Linux (Mint) I was breaking :-) But I've not rebooted the poor little netbook in several weeks through all this heat and several instances of heavy cat occupation. I'd feel rather ashamed if I hadn't managed to get a couple of BSODs a day out of a Windows setup ;-)

So long as there's someone around with a Windows machine for those few occasions when Linux or Android won't "do", I'm not going back to Microsoft, mainly due to my dislike of its UI. So I'm looking around for a nice minimalish Linux for the next laptop/upgrade.