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Comment by laurentiurad | Hacker News Reader

I believe it did. Are you satisfied with the software you use on a daily basis?

Yes, much better than the kernel panics, blue screens, easily hacked servers and random crashes of the past.

A lot of blue screens were caused by unstable graphics card drivers. Thank Microsoft for moving a lot of the graphics stack to userland in, I think, Vista -since then, GPU driver crashes don't take the entire system out as well.

WDDM 1.0 (Windows Display Driver Model) introduced with Vista, indeed came with TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) function for the video adapter, enabling a soft reset when possible.

A lot of BSOD were also caused by generic and low quality DRAM sticks, unstable individually (failed addresses) or becoming unstable when paired in dual channel setup, especially with 2 pairs of dual rank, dual sided sticks. Had very often this issue with Corsair Value sticks, or with a XMP (Intel spec) RAM kit used with 1/2/3th gen Ryzen, manually setup to match the 1.35V XMP profile (for DDR4). EXPO does this much better now.

Diag tools like Quicktech Pro then Memtest86+ from Passmark Software and the free one were born on this 'lost era'.

Yes, for the most part things work as I would expect them to.

I think software has actually gotten much more user friendly to the point where for existing computer users, using a new app is usually quite intuitive.

Feelings of dissatisfaction are likely due from having higher expectations.

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