computer crash dump

If you build a generic PC using a fairly good motherboard, eg MSI, and get an OEM version of Windows Whatever, you will usually have good results. If something does fubar, I wipe the partition the OS resides on using WipeDrive or a similar utility, and reinstall

The one gotcha to that technique is that if you use a separate partition or drive for your data files, you will have issues with Ownership. It's a bit cumbersome to have to Force Ownership on those folders and files

But with a mass market machine, like most of the Acer's, and a growing number of HP's and Dells, they play little tricks on you. The first clue is that you don't have actual recovery media included, you have to make your own

There is usually a hidden partition that is used to lock the machine to the vendor version of the OS. I found that out while helping a co-worker try to get her Acer Aspire laptop working again

It was about a year old, running Vista Basic, and something went haywire. So I thought, fine, just wipe the drive and reinstall, how hard could *that* be?

Except she didn't have any media included with the machine, it came in a box with the charger and a flimsy manual. She even tried to buy an OEM copy of Vista Home, and when I tried to install it, it claimed there was no hard drive! I tried an OEM version of XP Pro, it also claimed there was no hard drive

She got the media off Acer, it claimed "no partition error." Turns out Acer uses a hidden partition called PQSERVICE, and if this partition is damaged or overwritten, you're screwed

To prevent the thing from turning into a doorstop, I tried to install Ubuntu 8.10. Oddly enough, it installed just fine, it saw the hard drive, correctly partitioned and formatted it to EXT3, and everything worked except the wireless

After some searching, madwifi had the correct Atheros WiFi driver, and now she is tickled pink with a machine she claims is a *lot* faster than it used to be

So it appears Acer, with the full cooperation of Microsoft, can "lock" their hardware to their own crap version of Windows.

About a year ago, when I got my HP Vista Business laptop, I asked a lot of questions. They had one model that didn't have any media included, I avoided that one like the plague. They did have a model, a 6820s, that had media for both Vista Business and XP Pro SP2, I snatched that one

Not only can I wipe the drive, and reinstall Vista or XP, I can also run Ubuntu with no issues. Those sort of factory machines are hard to find, most will lock you to their kludgy OS

 

ya well, hidden partitions also have basic install files for various periphs like your network card, off the wall drive drive controllers, etc.

made the mistake of replacing a hard drive out of an Acer a few years back. it was running Win 95 and had specially "distorted" (i would say programmed, but not really the case here) soundcard drivers on MB that simply did not work anymore. i tried about a dozen different drivers directly from the MB manufacturers website (sound board company had gone out of business a few years before) a few dozen versions and nothing but standard microsoft drivers would provide even partial functionality. only problem is that every time the ms drivers were installed, it required a reboot. well, the sound card worked until the reboot, then it would stop working again.

wouldnt have been so bad cause i could have scripted it to install the driver again, except the card required separate install functions for like 5 different things (including crap like joysticks, etc) and had to be done in a certain order, etc... so needless to say, we ended up buying a different sound card altogether

 

+1 on that
I've long been a believer in building your own platform, after seeing how the "off the shelf" hardware is. I built my current machine about a year and a half ago with a Gigabyte motherboard and quad core processor, OEM copy of Vista Ultimate and have not had any problems at all with it.

 

Well, I think a large part of it is that Windows' driver model is very complicated. It's highly asynchronous - you don't get to complete a whole operation in one function, the OS will call you back when data arrives - so you have to break up operations a lot. It's concurrent - if you have more than one processor core, different bits of the driver can be executing on each core simultaneously. Depending on what else is going on, your code can even be interrupted by another bit of the same code. Microsoft have finally realised this and tried to come up with a model where the driver developer only has to override some bits of a standard implementation, rather than writing all their own code.

There's a certain amount of evidence that device manufacturers don't put their best software engineers on driver development, and that if there are issues in the device hardware, instead of fixing the hardware bugs (each board design costs a lot of money to produce), they try to work around it in the software.

There have also been issues where the driver developer second-guesses Microsoft and bypasses the correct way of doing things, going straight to the hardware. This usually backfires when the system encounters different hardware than was expected. Why is 32-bit Windows XP and Vista limited to 4GB of memory? Because although the processors support more memory than this even in 32-bit mode, the devices and drivers frequently don't - they can't handle the bigger physical memory addresses that result.

Trust a software engineer - device drivers do not live in remotely the same space as internet content. The only way it's related is that the video driver has to draw what the browser is doing - but it has to draw every other component of what you're seeing on screen.

Unless the program is passing bad parameters and those bad parameters aren't being handled by the driver properly, there is no way at all for a user-mode program to crash a system. That's the point of an operating system - to isolate programs from each other and from the details of the system.

It's common to claim that Internet Explorer is 'integrated' in Windows. It's about as integrated as your stereo is in your Prius. If you take IE out of Windows, some links stop working, but the mechanism to do it (in Windows 7 E which we're having foisted on us, thanks EU 'Competition' Commission) is to remove IEXPLORE.EXE. That's like removing the control panel but leaving the head unit in there. If you take out the stereo, your MFD will stop working properly as it relies on the stereo to make the beeps (on Gen 2, anyway). Take the infrastructure of IE out of Windows and every other program that uses that infrastructure for HTML rendering and internet downloads will break, including Help (which has been HTML-based since Windows 98). A lot of programs' help files are accidentally depending on IE bugs - I recall that some broke after installing IE 7.

 

WIndows has to be a "jack of all trades" in the plethora of various hardware available. The best/worst example of this is graphics cards.

 

Yet another reason I stubbornly cling to Win XP.

I did have an issue with a Logitech Webcam on an XP machine, though. I uninstalled it, and that took care of the issue.

I feel bad for you, Perryma... I've been there (though it was Win 98 that gave me errors on a regular basis...)

 

You can still buy brand new machines with XP Pro SP3

 

Where? I've already made up my mind my next computer is going to be a Mac, but just so I know where to steer people who are completely Mac-phobic who ask me for a computer recommendation.

 

I know that a local computer store here advertises that they have XP machines available.

I think you can still buy the OS through New Egg, for instance (newegg.com), and install it yourself.

 

Due to licensing agreements with Microsoft, most laptops and desktops with Vista Business include the XP disk. The HP business laptop, a 6820s, I bought around a year ago came with Vista Business preinstalled, and the XP Pro disk

Dell at their website, in the Small business category and up, allows you to build a machine with XP Pro

CDW offers new Acer, HP and Lenovo desktops with XP Pro either preinstalled, or with the XP Pro "downgrade" disk included

 

I usually deal with Tiger Direct, and yes they still offer XP Pro, and even XP Home. XP Pro OEM edition is SP3, not an older version like SP2