MicroVAX 3100 booting question...

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Thu Apr 26 08:39:53 2001

At 12:28 PM 4/26/01 +0100, Iggy Drougge wrote:
>I have no respect for a system which needs to be pampered before one may hit
>the power switch, so nowadays, I just flick the switch when I feel like it, be
>the system Windows, Mac or UNIX. Haven't had the opportunity with VMS yet. =)

Even with today's journaling file systems, I'm puzzled by the
shutdown message on my WinNT machine. It says something like
"Writing unsaved data to disk". Why would some file system
data remain in memory, even after minutes or hours of relative
inactivity on the system? Even a few seconds would be an
eternity for a CPU. Why would important data be deferred?

My first suspicion is the registry. I suspect they're stuffing
gunk back into it before shutdown.

And then there's Win9x boxes that can't seem to shut down, ever,
or some that seem to wait for a fail-safe timer to expire before
they really shut down, while others seem to shut down nearly
immediately.

I don't see the point of not warning the OS that you're planning
to hit the power button. You have no idea what scheduled event
is about to write to the disk. Why not give it a chance?

- John
Received on Thu Apr 26 2001 - 08:39:53 BST