Lets clear up some misconceptions

[Brian Kelsay]

Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

>Back in about '97 or so there was a series of articles acknowledging something 
>that us hardware techs knew - the now that Linux was a significant presence 
>and was reporting the actual reasons for crashes we were discovering that it 
>wasn't Windows that was responsible for the crashes.  Around the time the 
>Pentium 166 came out there was a serious improvement in motherboard 
>reliability that, combined with OEMSR2 of Windows 95 made for some 
>marvelously stable systems.
>
>Windows 95 is not significantly crash prone.  There is software that will lock 
>and crash it, but in itself it is a stable, reliable OS.  One of the most 
>reliable ways to get it to perform badly, lock up, and crash is to run Novell 
>products on it.
>
>With the exception of crashes caused by Internet Explorer and Outlook 98, I 
>have a Win95 system that has not had a "crash" since 1998.
>
>>From 1995 through 1998, I solved problem after problem on Windows 95, 98, and 
>NT systems by eliminating Novell traffic from the local network, removing the 
>Novell clients, and pithing the Novell servers.  NT servers were consistently 
>more reliable on the same hardware.
>
>If you're crashing Windows 95, you're a) running Novell on it, b) running some 
>third-party software on it that isn't W95 compatible, or c) running it on bad 
>hardware.  Admittedly, without the ability to run third-party software on it 
>an OS is pretty pointless, but it remains that it's not W95 that's unstable.
>  
>
Why should the OS lock up completely or crash, just because of a poorly 
written app you used.  The OS should control the hardware and sense that 
an app is doing something bad and shut down just the app.  e.g. detect 
memory leaks and race conditions.   Winders 2000 finally got some things 
right with the Hardware Abstraction Layer and the preemptive kernel 
(whatchamacallit, low-latency stuff,  I'm fuzzy headed right now).  
AS/400 and mainframes have been doing this right for a long time 
(although some are way slow and should be replaced).

-- 
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Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.