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Comment by nonrandomstring | Hacker News Reader

> computers the average schmo could afford never did.

No they really did.

Personal computers from the 80s will still boot (instantly) and perform perfectly today. I put modest servers together in the late 90s and they were still chugging away a decade into the next century. Uptimes of 3, 4 even 5 years were not unusual.

We live in a disposable culture now. I think many of the people disputing that simply haven't lived long enough to experience high quality engineering.

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I don’t know, if anything OSs were quite unstable (I can’t speak for the 80s, but slightly later). When was the last kernel crash you’ve seen? We definitely have less of those now than we had in the 2000s.

I had to reboot my Windows PC at least once every few days back in the XP and Vista era. BSODs were common especially while gaming. I think moving GPU drivers out of the kernel into userspace made a big difference as GPU driver crashes are now recoverable. Nowadays I can go weeks or months without rebooting, only rebooting for forced security updates.

I had a Windows XP machine that was pretty stable. I did reboot it sometimes. I now have a Windows 10 machine that is very stable, if you ignore the fact that it reboots itself All The Time. I have a dual-boot set up with linux as default. If I ignore the machine for more than a day or two it will have rebooted itself away from Windows into Ubuntu. Maybe this is a feature after all.

I’m fairly sure that’s just the idiot “shutdown is replaced by hibernate” of Windows doing something hard to explain. In short, if you press on the shutdown option in Windows it will instead hibernate by default to make “boots” faster. You have to shift-+click on the poweroff option on the menu for the behavior you want.

What probably happens is that it assumes it is the only OS and goes into another mode if not used for a few days? (This part I’m not sure about but the previous paragraph is true). But perhaps Ubuntu is your default in the boot order? Nonetheless, try to poweroff your windows with this shift+click and check if that solves the problem.

I agree that this is good, but was it worth all the extra expenditure in energy, resources, and environmental damage that it took to achieve? Rebooting my XP machine every few days (or, really, just getting in the habit of shutting it down when I was done for the day) didn't seem like a huge burden at the time.

Biweekly on my 2018 ipad pro

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