[OT] NT, software reliability, and the lack thereof.

From: Derek Peschel <dpeschel_at_u.washington.edu>
Date: Tue Mar 16 17:43:30 1999

Max Eskin wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Mar 1999, Derek Peschel wrote:

> >*starting over again*, seemingly at random. The defragmentation program
> >would be happily scanning C: and then it would put up a notice ("I need to
> >start again") and then redo everything it had done until then. This could
> >happen a couple of times in a row.

> The reason for this is disk accesses. If you moved the mouse, and it tried
> to swap in some tooltip code, that would restart the utility. After
> screwing up my system quite severely several times with Norton Utilities,
> Defrag, etc. I've resolved never to fiddle with Windows again. The thing
> is, I once stopped Defrag, by clicking the stop button, saying yes, etc.
> It must have forgotten to flush the buffer, since half the hard drive's
> contents vanished.

I suspected you would say something like that. Cameron said something
similar. That only makes me more willing to do what I was going to do
before -- blame the OS. Why is it swapping in so much code? Or, can't the
disk utilities do something to take control of the OS while they're fiddling
with the low-level disk bits?

I'll admit that I haven't seen an OS that allows you to do things AND safely
tweak the disks. Maybe one of the logging file systems? My point is that I
wouldn't be surprised to find that it's a difficult problem to solve.

...of course, MS always seems to solve these things especially badly...

-- Derek
Received on Tue Mar 16 1999 - 17:43:30 GMT