Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Tuesday 27 October 2009, 12:20 PM
Carry On Crashing: Windows 7 starts messing about
It may not have been the complete BSOD package, but the machine was thoroughly dead and the screen was blue: there was what may have been intended to be the traditional mystic hexadecimal runes of disaster on the screen, but they'd been scrambled into a cryptographic stew of white pixels. And it was making a most peculiar noise.
Just before this, I had been watching Carry On Spying on DVD - reaching the point where Kenneth Williams (in a fez) and Charles Hawtrey (as Beau Geste) were about to rush in on Barbara Windsor and Bernard Cribbins (both in belly-dancing outfits, both at imminent risk of violation from Eric Pohlmann, aka The Fat Man) in an Algerian bordello. A classic moment in British film, and Kenneth Williams was giving it his flared-nose hyper-camp all.
The exact point of silicon disaster hit as he was issuing a nasal vowel so elongated and swooping it fell from the sky like a roll of toilet paper thrown from the Kop. The screen blinked and went blue: the sound system locked into a death spasm, repeating 200 milliseconds of the audio ad infinitum. The death knell of Windows 7, I can report, sounds like this:
"OooOooOooOooOooOooOooOooOoo..."
I enjoyed the moment, then reset the computer. The laptop, a by now rather venerable Sony Vaio, recovered at length: I replayed the scene, but all was well.
I think it's safe to blame Windows 7. The laptop had previously been running Vista for a couple of years - I try and use whatever MS' latest OS is daily, even though I hadn't warmed to Vista after all that time - and I'd performed an in-place upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. (That took around four hours, but as I had the luck or foresight to kick that off on a Saturday morning before retiring back to bed for a long lie, I was as refreshed as the computer once it had completed.)
I was using the same application for DVD playback as I had for many DVDs before; there were no hardware changes or configuration fiddling beyond what had come in on the Windows 7 installation. I'd certainly never experienced a failure like that under Vista; although I had had a couple of catastrophic crashes, they happened when I was running beta software or messing around with peculiar hardware.
And so, pace Talbot Rothwell and the Pinewood posse, I fear we have to conclude that the longest running farce on the small screen has got some acts left to go before conclusion.
PreviousComments on this post
Rupert, reading your blog often makes my day, and this is one of those times. Both for content and especially style.
Thanks.
jw
Sounds like something in-place may have become a little squashed. Upgrade media can be used for a fresh install as long as there is a copy of windows detected on the hard drive.
Upgraded windows is never quite the same as a fresh install. In my experience, doing the in-place upgrade is asking for trouble.
Having said that, I have been showing people how to undertake the long winded upgrade process from XP to 7 (vista first don't activate).
I'm happily running a fresh copy of 7 on an ex-vista rig.
When I installed the RC on an older acer ferrari XP rig, apart from looking beautiful it started blue screening all over the place, often on boot. Turned out the hard drive was on it's last legs.
This seems to me to be a wake-up call to those that are debating on whether to upgrade or do a clean install. Well Done.
Thanks Rupert for another enjoyable article, you seem to have a knack for putting things in perspective. I have been playing with the RC off and on, and have had several BSOD's, but then I was expecting them, so it came as no surprise.
My main interest in win7 was just to see if all the hype about what a great improvement it was over vista had any merit, and as yet I cannot see any reason for using it as my primary OS, or plunking down any silver when the RC runs out.
BSOD??!!?? I honestly havn't seen one of these in years on my PC's at home, not since win98 days. Vista I never touched, cos it was sluggish and very demanding, so back to XP. all my hardware that was running on xp is now happily running on win7. playing DVD's, games (batman, gta4 etc) on 3 year old hardware, poses no problems at all, after a clean installation, which took only 1 hour. I think Rupert you should just put it down to 'a glitch', which does happen from time to time, no matter what OS you're using or DVD you're watching (Carry On Films??!!!??!!!). keep up the good in the labs :-)
I'm by no means saying it wasn't a glitch. One-off happenings are anecdote, not data. However, the laptop isn't glitchy, and I'm hearing about other BSODs from other Windows 7 users.
I'll try watching something more improving next time. Probably For All Mankind, the single best documentary about Apollo ever produced.
Since I've read and replied to this blog, I've ahd two worrying explorer lock ups, that never occured with the Beta and RC versions....hope this is not a sign of things to come.
I too will be coming from XP to 7 when i get me arse into gear and order another hdisk, I'm not expecting any more crashes than XP to be honest but haven't said that XP is a hell of a lot more matured than any other build of windows, I can run that for day's or weeks without trouble depending on the applications of course.
Don't forget though chaps hardware becomes very springy when put under a bit more load especially memory modules, it's good that they had a RC for the last year no doubt things would have being much worse if they had not.
I reckon at least another year minimum before we start to see it mature and settle down a bit more, given how they was still a large number of developers out there that did not participate in the RC program.
@Roger - I'm afraid that it is a sign of things to come, but then I might be just a tiny bit prejudiced about that.
I have question about your informal upgrade recommendations, by the way. You have mentioned once before that one way of upgrading XP to Win7 would be to upgrade it to Vista first and then upgrade that to Win7, without bothering to activate the Vista installation. That makes sense, in terms of reaching the desired end point. But almost since the day Vista was released, I have read that upgrading XP to Vista was a bad idea, and often produced systems which crashed. That was exactly my own experience, too, during the time when I was trying to use Vista on my S6510 - clean installs always worked better than upgrades, at least at first (they all ended up crashing sooner or later). So the question is, do you think that the XP-Vista-Win7 upgrade sequence does not suffer from these problems, perhaps because Win7 should be replacing whatever parts of Vista didn't like the upgrade? Or is what we are seeing perhaps the first indications that upgrade installations are no better idea with Win7 than they were with Vista?
Curious minds want to know!
jw
I left the Wacky World of Windows when win98 came out so I'm probably talking nonsense.
However, why no just copy out the user data then simply wipe and install?
@jw I must confess that I've only done the xp/vista/7 upgrade once and vista was only on the system for five minutes before I put in the windows 7 disk. Just long enough to use the registry tidy up function with c-cleaner. It ran without trouble for a few months until I put xp back on there so I could use it as a testing rig. (having two other computers with fresh installs of windows 7)
The registry is always a complete mess when doing an upgrade so that's an important task to carry out for me and the last thing I would want to be upgrading is detritus from the registry and accumulated junk files/cookies. It's also worth removing apps such as office and any heavy audio or video software and reinstalling those afterwards to save upgrade time. This is also true if you come across rigs with multiple gigabytes of music and video. Although if they exist in a seperate drive partition (recommended) it doesn't really matter.
The most important function to carry out after upgrading is drive defragmentation as this can quickly stress a hard drive and cause a few mighty crashes if not attended to. For this I use the superb and free smart de-frag. When you first analyse the drive, you are not likely to see one file left intact. This is also true after taking a brand new computer out of the box.
To really answer your question, unless you are willing to go through the pain then don't hop skip and jump through the upgrades, and yes windows 7 will gradually slow down without the usual maintenance. It really does help to have smart defrag load up with windows and auto defrag when the machine is idle. This has led to many a happy windows user and less call outs from those particular customers.
Some really good information on the flexability of windows upgrade media can be found here. http://www.winsupersite.com/win7/
@Tezzer I'm not sure but I fear the registry settings will be out of kilter and screw it all up.
I use Auslogics Boost Speed application to keep me system prim & proper and it works like a dream, mind you setting up all the individual sub applications settings can be tedium but once done its fantastic, and as long as they don't screw it up I will continue to use this for my system maintenance. 5/5
@Tezzer - Copying the data will save something like 50%-75% of what is necessary, depending on the user. For younger users, it might be as high as 90%, because the vast majority of their data will be music and videos. The hard part is keeping applications intact, whenever possible, and for that upgrades are just about the only solution. As I'm sure you are very aware, what has changed since you very wisely bailed out of Windows is the introduction of the "Registry". What that has effectively done is change copying over applications from being difficult and tedious (involving tracking down endless .ini files, other config files, things dropped into other bizarre places) to being essentially impossible. So if you do a wipe-and-install, you have to be able to reinstall all of the users applications, which means they have to be able to find the discs or download files they installed from, which in my experience is rare. Very rare. Without even getting into the very common situations of "I installed it from a disc I borrowed from my neighbor...".
This does bring up another question that I hadn't thought about, though. Microsoft and their religious followers tout the "migration tools" provided to help XP users change to Win7. Do these tools do anything about existing installed applications, or do they only deal with saving and restoring data and configuration?
@Roger - Thanks for the clarification. I would guess that the key difference when you do the XP-Vista-Win7 upgrade is taking the time to do the Registry cleanup and disk defrag along the way. Good idea.
jw
@Rupert
Infamy, infamy..... You know that what you have there is a driver causing the problem? Worth asking Windows Update to polish your optical drive one more time... And while we're having no problems with Vista->w7 or RC->RTM upgrades, I will say we're seeing better performance with clean installs.
@jw if you're wanting to migrate application data as well as the user settings and data that the Ms tools handle, take a look at the Laplink migration tools which claim to do this. Personally, given the number of DLLs in the average app, I'd rather take the time to re-install the apps. The only apps I care about the specific data from are ClipMate and Office; ClipMate backs itself up and Office will save your settings from the Office Tools (though I use an AutoCorrect backup macro). As I shift PCs as often as other women buy new shoes, I have the whole thing down to a couple of hours, including the OS install. If I was really organised, I'd slipstream the apps and settings into a custom Win 7 image.
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