Microsoft Denies Windows 7 "Showstopper Bug" 241
Barence writes "Windows chief Steven Sinofsky has taken the unusual step of responding in the comments of a blog posting that claimed Windows 7 was suffering from a potential 'showstopper bug'. Stories had been sweeping the Internet that using the chkdsk.exe utility on a second hard disk would lead to a massive memory leak bringing the operating system to its knees in seconds. Responding to a blog post titled 'Critical Bug in Windows 7 RTM,' Sinofsky wrote: 'While we appreciate the drama of "critical bug" and then the pickup of "showstopper" that I've seen, we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level.' He signs off with the words: 'deep breath.'"
What about this one? (Score:4, Interesting)
Bad, BAD fucking move, Microsoft. Now Windows 7 can easily fuck up unrecognized partitions on other drives during installation. I really hope that gets fixed in the final version.
Re:RAM optimization (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey, but it's nothing like that. Using all of your RAM to check a disk for damage and repair it in response to a user's specific request is not like having Outlook open in the background.
Re:What about this one? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think if you use an existing partition instead of making a new one Windows will just put everything on one partition.
Anyways you could always copy the files and boot sector from the small partition to the Windows 7 one and raze the small one, then you just need to edit the BCD registry using EasyBCD or bootedit.exe to point to the correct partition on boot. But yeah those are both WINDOWS tools... but bootedit.exe should be available from Windows 7 Setup on the DVD if you mess up and can't boot into Windows (press SHIFT+F10), and fixboot.exe can install the boot sector onto any partition.
Re:Arcane? (Score:3, Interesting)
"chkdsk" isn't an arcane process. "chkdsk -r" on this particular chipset employs an arcane process to do an in depth check for physical problems on the drive. In other words, this bug: only affects people running "chkdsk -r" on a secondary hard drive, with a particular chipset, who have not update their chipset driver, and is caused by an arcane process within the un-updated driver. I'm hardly a Microsoft apologist, but this seems like a Hell of a tempest in a teapot to me.
(As a side note, anybody know how capitalization works when a sentence begins with a reference to a command? Changing the first letter to a capital actually changes the name of the command, at least in Unix, so it seems like the wrong thing to do.)
Re:RAM optimization (Score:5, Interesting)
I regularly put customer's hard drives into a different computer as a secondary drive and run chkdsk. Your math sort of makes it seem like 4-5% of a market isn't a lot to account for, yet that 4-5% means in terms of the OS market hundreds of millions of users. Should we let you take those support calls?
Re:RAM optimization (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually isn't not unresponsive, Outlook will give up RAM quite happily and it's not opening 3 emails, it's keeping your entire PST/OST loaded into RAM so you don't bitch and complain when selecting different emails is "slow to load". Therefore if you have big .PST/OST expect for it to use alot of RAM.
However, I'm sitting on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with 6GB of RAM and Outlook is using 200MB total including what's committed for use and what's it happily taking because it can. I have 457MB .OST (Exchange cached file) so wanting to load half of it's not unreasonable. Linux uses similar memory management system and I don't hear alot of complaining about it.
Re:What about this one? (Score:3, Interesting)
Funny, I just wrote up something about this in my last post. You must've been reading my mind! (Although, I didn't exactly experience it with Windows 7.)
Generally, I install other OSes to their own drives. In the XP days, it'd attempt to overwrite grub (or other bootloaders) on drive(s) you weren't installing XP to. Talk about ridiculous! Though, that may have been an artifact of the other drive being reported by BIOS as the primary. I'm not wholly sure.
As a consequence, I've never gone passed that lovely little warning in XP's loader without unplugging everything except the drive I install to. Paranoid? Absolutely. I hate reinstalling things. To me, it's better to spend a few minutes taking some precautions than having a nasty surprise.
I do realize installing to separate partitions might be easier, but hard disks are cheap as are external enclosures. Plus, if I don't like something, I can always treat myself to having another back-up disk/extra space/experiment disk/etc.
Re:RAM optimization (Score:3, Interesting)
Did you read the article? It stated rather plainly that the problem was with chkdsk /r. When Windows schedules chkdsk, it's usually after a crash or improper shutdown--and it does not attempt to scan for and fix bad sectors. Never have I seen Windows perform an automatic check in this particular case on other hard disks besides the boot device. Chances are, if chkdsk is run frequently for a lot of people, they're not shutting it down correctly (pulling the plug comes to mind). If that's the case, they're going to have far more trouble than just an OS crash.
So no, I think you're wrong. Very few people manually run chkdsk much less chkdisk /r.