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Comment by speeder | Hacker News Reader

Bill made it famous with his crashy software that made knowing it needed...

These days of windows 8 I still have to use it regularly because of freezing programs and OS issues.

I'd rather say it's was the crashy software running on top of Windows that made it famous. Can't even remember last time I needed to use it for a Windows component itself.

It's been famous for probably longer than you've been paying attention, then. Windows stability has made huge strides over the past 20ish years.

I know, I've been using it for more than 2 decades :P And I always had the feeling that the amount of crashes due to actual OS bugs is way lower than what the common belief seems to be. Way over 90% of problems I witnessed myself was duewas dues to faulty software, drivers or hardware. And as you say it just got better with most releases which is (just guessing) partly due to less OS bugs and partly due to the OS taking better care of dealing with bad 3rd party software.

In win98 kernel32 blue screens were pretty common. But I agree that Windows is usually a pretty stable OS with things like 3rd party drivers and software causing most of the issues

Well sure, but faulty software should be limited in its ability to do damage, and I think it's fair to lay some blame at the feet of the OS when it fails to prevent that.

Faulty 3rd party software should never be allowed to cause kernel panics (aka BSODs)

That is possibly overstating the case. Depending on demands on performance and/or control it might make sense to sacrifice some stability... but it does count against the stability of the system.

Recent versions of Windows have been incredibly stable. Are you sure you don't have hardware issues?

In Windows, I generally just default to CTRL+SHIFT+ESC which immediately brings up the Task Manager. At work, I'll use WINKEY+L to lock the machine. It's very rare that I actually need to use the CTRL+ALT+DELETE key combination.

> Bill made it famous with his crashy software that made knowing it needed...

And he doesn't seem too proud of it ;-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdGQsBDSEpk

DOS was a real mode operating system, and so any bugs in any software could (and usually did) crash the computer. You can't blame Microsoft for that.

OS issues such as?

Like allowing a poorly coded game hijack your screen and having no way to fix it but using control alt del and hitting keys hoping it will close the offending program...

Or crashes related to Adobe products, or Apple products... I know it is mainly not windows fault, but there are some OSes that are more resilient to stupid programs.

Do you happen to remember what game it was? I haven't seen a case in over a decade where pure user-mode code caused a denial of service type attack on the OS. There is a possibility that kernel-mode DRM crap installed by the game caused problems in your case. When you're in kernel-mode though, all bets are off and no OS can save you.

Also I don't understand what you mean by resilient to stupid programs? A general purpose OS should terminate badly written programs the instant it runs into a crashing-bug.

Try Cntr + Shift + Esc next time ;-)

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