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technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Windows 2000 has a weak spot: Video troubles can make it crash without warningMarch 5, 2000 By Al Fasoldt Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers Is Windows 2000 crash-proof? Far from it. It's a lot more stable than Windows 95 and Windows 98, but that's not saying much, is it? I found out the other day how Microsoft cut corners with Windows 2000. I'm not a software engineer, but I'm not a dummy, either. You don't need a degree in nuclear rockosocketology to spot a dark, blank screen where icons and windows had stood a few minutes before. An operating system that crashes doesn't ask if you know anything operating systems. It just dies on you. I think Microsoft goofed big time with Windows 2000. The problem has to do with the way Windows 2000 handles the screen display. It's not a fatal flaw. It's a big flaw, but it's not something that should keep you from using Windows 2000. But it is something you should know about. (And you won't hear about this from Microsoft.) Here's what Microsoft did. Here's how Microsoft cheated Windows 2000 out of a chance to be truly stable under all conditions, the way Unix and Linux are. Microsoft stuck the video operation into an area of memory that isn't protected. By "protected," I mean walled off. That's how an operating system is supposed to work. That's the way Linux works, for example. Each operation is walled off from all other operations. Something that behaves poorly can't mess up something else. If a program crashes, nothing else happens. The operating system keeps operating -- and so does the computer. That's the way Linux works, and from that simple explanation alone you can understand why Linux has so many admirers. That's also the way Microsoft's current version of Windows NT works. You can also see why Windows NT has a lot of admirers. Windows 2000 is actually Windows NT made pretty. Almost. It's Windows NT made pretty and made less safe. Microsoft changed the way the video display is handled to make Windows 2000 faster. It was a legitimate decision, trading off safety for speed. But it doesn't take more than one crash to make you a firm believer in slowness and safety. My Windows 2000 PC had been operating for weeks without a single problem. Then I tried to make a recording from a videotape onto the PC's hard drive -- something I'd done countless times before under Windows 98. (The PC has a video-capture device that makes this possible.) As soon as I clicked the menu item that I've always used to route the taped signal into the computer, my Windows 2000 PC rebooted. It didn't lock up or sit there and show me an error message or anything that polite. It simply failed. The fact that it failed in the worst way possible, providing no chance for me to save my work, giving no warning that would have let me try another approach, is not surprising. I've seen this kind of behavior before -- from Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and Windows 98. And from MS-DOS, the ancestor of Windows. Those operating systems don't have any way to keep things from going bad when memory gets scrambled. Memory is the same thing for a computer as it is for me and you. Nothing in the world can make you remember something if your memory is going bad or if something is bothering you so much that your mind plays tricks on you. Nothing can make your computer keep operating if something is bothering your computer so much that it forgets how to do things. In my case, Windows 2000 forgot how to keep running. In an instant, the computer went from running normally to a complete reboot. Everything that was running was zapped. Windows 2000 did the worst possible thing. It lost its mind. Will this happen to you? Sure, if you do something Windows 2000 can't handle. Any operating system can be tripped up. (Pull the plug on my Linux computers and you'll see them fail, too.) But changing the way the video operation is handled in Windows NT to the way it's done in Windows 2000 caused the problem I saw. Microsoft took a gamble, and I lost. I still like Windows 2000. It's far better than Windows 98. It's much better than the successor to Windows 98, a version called Windows Millennium. (It will be out later this year.) As many of you have written to point out, Windows 2000 is the successor to Windows NT. It's not the successor to Windows 98. That's a shame. Microsoft is going to aim Windows 2000 at businesses, not at consumers. Why Microsoft would improve Windows and then try to get consumers to stay away from it is a mystery, if we view Microsoft as a company that has consumer interests at heart. If we see it another way -- as a monopoly, as sort of Father-knows-best oligarchy, a kind of bratty bully that covers his ears when anyone complains -- then we might see this as an attempt to sell more and more upgrades. I don't know if this makes sense, but the theory goes like this: Microsoft can make a lot more money selling you and me an operating system that does NOT work right than selling one that does work right. Operating systems that don't work right have to be upgraded. In other words, you can make more money selling the same thing three times than you can selling it once. I don't know. This seems too much like a bad movie plot. But I'm also struck by the different attitude taken by Linux developers. There's no way Linux could be made weaker this way. It's not a closed system controlled by bean counters somewhere. Programmers who care about the way things work create and debug and fine-tune the code in Linux. I know that Microsoft has programmers who care about the way things work. Wouldn't it be great if the company paid attention to them? |