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Saturday 21 March 2009, 4:25 AM
Broken Windows Part 2
Its been about 2 and a half years since the system was done the last time. It seems as if 2 to 3 years is all a “stable” Windows installation can last before it goes sour and starts getting really cranky. So the system was skating along headed to the typical demise. It was going to happen some time soon because it has happened with every freaking version of Windows all the way back to Windows 3.1, the 16 bit stuff. It happens on the XP Pro and Home systems at home. It happens to my neighbors who run Windows. Yes the Workstation 3.51 and the 4.0 NT stuff did it too. Putting anti-virus on it only seems to make the stable periods shorter not longer.
I tried to avoid it this time by removing a bunch of unneeded software and cleaning the registry out but that didn't help this time. Debugger windows kept popping up every 10 minutes. Got really annoying.
Time to take advantage of the situation. 120 Gigabytes was enough space for a Windows XP Pro install. The rest of the drive, another 115 GB, got Windows 7 Beta. Both partitions are on the same drive and both are primary partitions so access time should be near the same.
The plan is to install exactly the same applications on the Windows 7 partition as on the XP partition. The comparison will be of the two operating systems running exactly the same programs on the same hardware.
The rest of the computer of course will be identical for both systems. Its a DELL GX620 with 4GB of DDR2 RAM, nearly 1TB of total HDD space on 4 drives, a CDRW drive and a DVD R/RW drive. The CPU is a 2.8 GHz Pentium D (one of the earlier Dual CPUs from Intel), video is a dual monitor NVidia DVI/Analog PCI Express card, and the networking is handled by 2 1Gbps Ethernet ports. If the machine ever gets retired it has a home here at the house!
Let's see if the flying monkeys have actually made things better or worse compared to XP Pro and ignore the stuff in the middle. This will be a "real world" comparison test, at least as real as it gets in "my world" ha! Its going to tell me more than the statistics and computer lab tests do. I'll know pretty soon which OS works better just trying to get my work done.
PreviousComments on this post
Good luck mate...let us know what the outcome was???
This will be very interesting, I will be anxious to see the results.
A couple of other small comments. First, if you want to look on the positive side, the fact that XP is able to last 2+ years before you have to wipe and reinstall it is progress - it used to be 1 - 2 years at the most. Second, did you really get XP installed in 120 MB, and Win7 in 115 MB (not GB)?
jw
Hi there. Is in not worth running a repair install, or using the command line to repair the file system when it goes wrong? I have found these methods very effective
I left all the pithy descriptions out of the all the things I did do to eliminate the debugger messages from coming up. I tried everything I could think of. I had to swallow my pride and go ask the IT guy to come in and give me a hand and he really didn't do anything more than I did. We more or less decided to eliminate the issue by wiping the drive after I copied everything off I needed to keep and started from bare metal. In the long run it often takes less time than trying to fix the problem.
Yes I do Ghost the system periodically but who's to say when the problem first began precisely? Which system image is clean and is it also the one that has my current set of tools I need installed? I install and uninstall a lot of software. When I'm done using something we only have a single license for, I'll un-install it and give up the install disk to the IT department so they can use it or loan it out to somebody else.
I let my Windows XP Pro system that is only running SQL Server 2005 get updated today and I discovered that is where I screwed up. Now its generating VS2005 debugger messages AND it has the debugger installed now when it didn't have ANYTHING connected to debugging installed on it yesterday!
Normally it sits behind a computer that is also behind a router, inside the corporate firewall and its unconnected to the Active DIrectory Domain. It usually sits at the end of a dedicated cross-over cable directly connected to my design system that queries the SQL database. Not even a switcher gets in the way.
I have regretted ever connecting the SQL Server to any network connection at any time in the past but I was tired today and didn't think too clearly about it. It downloaded 23-odd updates and installed them. I re-booted and within 15 minutes I started noticing the error messages. Tomorrow I'm going to have to un-install the updates one by one until I can figure out which one is screwing up the system.
Its gotten to where I really hate Windows.
