Comment by hippich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hippich | Hacker News Reader

Recently I decided to play some game and had to boot windows partition which I did not use from the date of laptop purchase. So I went through Windows clean installation process and then it all started - scrolling on touchpad not working, directx not working with pre-packaged drivers (had to download over 600 megs of video drivers - have no clue what take so much space.) While downloading it, I browsed some news and got my Internet Explorer crashed - I would not be surprised if this was some trojan stuff delivered through null-sized iframe.

Since I do not have DVDROM, I had to find some ISO mounter. Again, downloading megs of software from some website and hoping it is not packaged with some trojan.

After installing this iso mounter, it asks me to install .NET framework. After googling it - it says ~1 meg to download. Fine, downloading and running it from microsoft website. After it run it starts downloading something else form somewhere.... Done.

Video drivers downloaded - installing. Asks to reboot. Rebooting - blue screen every time I restart machine.... In the end - whole evening was spent to play single game and I end up with BSOD. Saying "FU" and return back to my Ubuntu to continue coding.

After couple hours of coding my machine randomly freezes... this started to happen after installing AMD proprietary drivers...

So two things I learned that evening: - We are all screwed no matter what OS we use! :) - I need to buy xbox/ps/wii to play games :)

You might also have a hardware problem.

Yes, if you are getting actual BSOD under a recent version of Windows it is almost always the result of a hardware problem.

Make a note of the error message at the top of the BSOD and google for it.

If you want to do some tests , download something called "Ultimate boot CD" which is a boot disk with a combination of DOS and Linux based hardware test programs. I've used it to find faulty memory on many a misbehaving system.

I am pretty sure it is not hardware problem since I am using it for development and do all kinds of crazy stuff for last half a year. :) The thing about windows - you get more support from hardware manufacturer, but you get screwed by the fact it is all proprietary and often stuff from one manufacturer is not working with software from different one. And due to closed source approach there is no way to peek into it to see if it can be fixed or there could be workaround.

Another gem from this fresh windows install - headphones will work only if I boot into Windows while headphones are plugged in. If I boot without headphones and then plug headphones after I log in - no sound in headphones :)

My point is - there are all kinds of bugs in all popular OSes. I bet MacOS have bunch of them too. You just getting used to ones. Like it is never a problem for me to fix a webcam in linux, but it frustrates me to download 600 megs of drivers software to get my video card functional. The same way OP really frustrated by broken webcam and not really concerned about windows needs to update drivers, constantly monitor for viruses, etc.

One thing I noted tho - most frustration with Ubuntu (or any really linux desktop) I see comes the fact that some particular hardware is not working. The same hardware often have problems on Windows platform. And more often than not drivers/software for this hardware are closed source with bugs which never get fixed (because manufacturer's business in selling hardware, not software.) So apparently we would not have most of these issues with any OS if software required to run hardware would be open sourced. This will never happen probably tho..

To be fair, most of those things you mentioned sound like issues individual drivers rather than the OS. You are likely to have closed source drivers under Linux too, a variety of GPUs and Wireless cards do not offer open source drivers (or at least with full features).

You might not need 600MB of drivers for your video card, it's that the manufacturer packages it with 600MB of software. On a modern HDD 600MB isn't so much anymore.

BSOD really does overwhelmingly indicate some hardware failure, it is not uncommon for a PC (especially one that is highly used) to develop failures later in it's life. I would suspect common culprits to be your power supply, memory or HDD.

Yeah, I totally agree that major problems comes from closed-sourced drivers. And it doesn't matter what OS you use - Linux or Windows. MacOS it is a bit easier since Apple controls both hardware and software. It is not a case with PC platform in general.

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