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Jan. 2nd, 2008 03:14 pm
Chalk one up for Windows Vista
Windows, and Vista in particular, have taken a pretty bad rap. Much of the criticism is deserved, but certainly not all. The computer that botched the fireworks show at the Space Needle the other night apparently runs Windows (something which has not officially been confirmed as far as I know) which has resulted in much additional derision. So I want to provide an account of where Windows Vista was made of win.
A few days ago I was tuning my desktop computer's performance using nVidia's nTune utility. As the motherboard as an nVidia nForce 4 chipset, this program can dynamically alter certain performance parameters such as the front side bus speed, memory timings, etc. It is expected that the computer will hang or crash during this process as nTune is basically pushing the performance until it fails. Well that's exactly what happened so I rebooted the computer at which point nTune would realize that Something Bad had happened after its last adjustment and proceed accordingly. Except that the computer didn't boot. Instead I got a message that a system file, specifically ntoskrnlpa.exe, was corrupt or missing. This is the kernel, the core of the OS.
Now lest you roll your eyes and express a lack of surprise that Vista would eat its own kernel, keep in mind that I was doing something that the system is not at all designed to do normally. I can't imagine that this file is opened other than read-only let alone that a single instruction exists in the entirety of Windows Vista that writes to this file. The only cause I can think of is that the system crashed in such a way that the cpu's last gasp resulted in a spurious write to the hard drive. Whatever the mechanism, you can't pin this one on Windows.
So I got this message which also tells me how to solve it. Simply boot from the Vista installation CD, choose Repair Windows, and follow the directions. I did so. About 20 seconds after I clicked the Repair Windows link I was informed that it was done and I could reboot. Once I did so, all was well.
Yes, MS did some things wrong. But they also did some things right.
A few days ago I was tuning my desktop computer's performance using nVidia's nTune utility. As the motherboard as an nVidia nForce 4 chipset, this program can dynamically alter certain performance parameters such as the front side bus speed, memory timings, etc. It is expected that the computer will hang or crash during this process as nTune is basically pushing the performance until it fails. Well that's exactly what happened so I rebooted the computer at which point nTune would realize that Something Bad had happened after its last adjustment and proceed accordingly. Except that the computer didn't boot. Instead I got a message that a system file, specifically ntoskrnlpa.exe, was corrupt or missing. This is the kernel, the core of the OS.
Now lest you roll your eyes and express a lack of surprise that Vista would eat its own kernel, keep in mind that I was doing something that the system is not at all designed to do normally. I can't imagine that this file is opened other than read-only let alone that a single instruction exists in the entirety of Windows Vista that writes to this file. The only cause I can think of is that the system crashed in such a way that the cpu's last gasp resulted in a spurious write to the hard drive. Whatever the mechanism, you can't pin this one on Windows.
So I got this message which also tells me how to solve it. Simply boot from the Vista installation CD, choose Repair Windows, and follow the directions. I did so. About 20 seconds after I clicked the Repair Windows link I was informed that it was done and I could reboot. Once I did so, all was well.
Yes, MS did some things wrong. But they also did some things right.