Wednesday, September 07, 2005

Blue Screen of Death:
Good For You?

Sure it is.

6 comments:

Carlee said...

Very interesting little blurb about the BOSD. I had a bout of it a while back and spent almost three hours on tech support just to get rid of it. It involved a ton of restarts, but eventually everything was fine. Does Linux ever have the blue screen of death? Or is just wonderful Windows?

rcjhawk said...

It's possible to crash Linux, but not as often as the BOSD seems to
appear on Linux. Most "crashes" that I've experienced have come from
X11 (the windowing system) getting hung up, while the underlying OS
remains running. (The windowing system under Unixes runs on top of the
OS, not as a part of it, sort of like, but better than, Windows 3.1 on
top of DOS.) Theoretically you can gracefully shut down from an X
Windows crash using keyboard input
but so far that hasn't worked for me.

I'm at home, not at work, so I can't look right now, but I'd estimate my
uptime on the Linux box at work is about 30 days, and the only reason
it's not longer is that I'd shut it off to do some physical work on the
box.

rcjhawk said...

Oooh, that was ugly. Mental note: Don't cut and paste comments into Blogger's comment box, or, at least, edit out the extraneous line feeds.

Carlee said...

So, from your first comment, I gather that the BOSD becomes more likely the longer you leave your computer on without shutting down. I am curious about that because my roommate never shuts down the computer unless I specifically ask her. I always feel like my PC performs better if it gets a little down/off time now and then.

rcjhawk said...

OK, I'm not a Windows expert. But it seems to me that after a time, Windows picks up junk (memory leaks, unclosed programs, etc.) that tend to slow down the system. There are probably some tweaks that will eliminate this. It's easier, though, to turn the thing off at night and on in the morning.

Carlee said...

Hm...Ok. Thanks for the discussion!