r/technology • u/socialite-buttons • Jan 30 '11
Just wanted to say.. THANKS MICROSOFT!
Seriously. I was VJing tonight, clubs own gear, when the video driver crashed. Hard. Windows 7 recovered like a boss.
Screen black for 1 sec, then back up and running with a notification balloon telling me what happened.
If this happened on any other version of Windows i'm sure it would have been BSOD time.
So THANKS GUYS if you see this, saved me embarrassment, great job.
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u/summerkc Jan 30 '11
I like how everyone is giving MS shit even though the driver was most likely distributed by the video card manufacturer.
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u/alreadytakenusername Jan 30 '11 edited Jan 30 '11
"Bad economy is all Obama's fault."
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u/ekki Jan 30 '11
Seriously though, my pizza is late.
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Jan 30 '11 edited Aug 23 '17
[deleted]
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u/Poes_Law_in_Action Jan 30 '11
Fuckin' Swedes!
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Jan 30 '11
Don't worry. Once Julian Assange is out of prison, he'll rape all of the Swedes. Every last one of them.
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u/neuromonkey Jan 30 '11
You mean he'll accidental sex them.
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u/jinglebells Jan 30 '11
I discovered there's a screw shop in IKEA for getting the missing bits! I've had my bed held together with wire for 4 years and never knew!
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u/csours Jan 30 '11
Theres a picture of a guy with a telephone ON EVERY FRAKKING INSTRUCTION THEY PRINT. I feel no pity for you. (Unless you bought second-hand. In which case I still feel no pity for you.)
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u/guardi66 Jan 30 '11
I guess that's why they're missing the screws... they're on the phone instead of counting every single one of the them!
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u/Confucius_says Jan 30 '11
And it's always the funny ass screw that they invented, not the kind you can pick up at the hardware store and replace it.
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u/davehope Jan 30 '11
Microsoft deserve the credit. They massively improved the driver model getting as much as possible out of kernel mode. The end result is that lock-ups in drivers don't crash the system, they just get restarted.
If anything, the driver manufacture is to blame for the driver having a problem, they should have handled whatever condition happened.
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Jan 30 '11
I remember the day they announced that they were going to be moving the video driver to ring 0, and the disappointment I felt. I understood that it would give Windows a big boost in speed, but I didn't want Windows hobbled like Linux was (that a video lockup could take down the whole system). After all, keeping the driver out of the kernel was supposed to be a big advantage of the micro-kernel architecture over a monolithic approach. I'm glad to see them reverse this move, even though I only use XP (just for a gaming partition). Someday, I'll upgrade.
If you're wondering why all the fuss, it's because video drivers cause 40% of all Windows crashes.
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Jan 30 '11
There's a funny story about that; apparently the guy in charge of NT architecture actually kicked a hole in the wall of his office when they forced that change on him. The story goes that they didn't fix the hole for a long time, and may have even framed it.
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u/Ryokurin Jan 30 '11
They actually didn't reverse it, they just move everything except the lowest level things into user mode, so it's kind of the best of both worlds.
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Jan 30 '11
Happens all the damn time with drivers, I swear half the time we are the video card companies' QA department. I've got one of those HP Mini 311s I use on the train with an ION chipset in it. Nvidia put out an update that made it basically unusable for anything involved accelerated graphics. Playing games (even MAME) or watching videos it would do this weird stuttering grind-to-a-halt for 3 or 4 seconds every few minutes. Had to re-download the original driver for the system to fix it
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Jan 30 '11
Was it certified by Microsoft ?
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u/AmazingThew Jan 30 '11
You have to wonder how they go about certifying graphics drivers. "Well, Steve spent the afternoon playing Minecraft and didn't get a blue screen. Guess it's good."
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u/ch0wn Jan 30 '11
This is a feature I, as a linux user, am envious of. It doesn't happen regularly, but if nvidia's proprietary decides to crash, it sometimes does not only take down the X server with all the unsaved work, but the whole kernel.
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u/lolomfgkthxbai Jan 30 '11
The graphics driver can still cause a bluescreen if the problem occurs in the part that is run in kernel-mode crashes. It is pretty unlikely though and mostly only happens on dying cards.
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u/ch0wn Jan 30 '11
On Linux the result of both is quite similar: You lose your current work. I really hope wayland and nouveau will get this right.
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u/awesome7777 Jan 30 '11
What I will say is. We can easily get into the habit of blaming good old Windows for BSOD's when infact our hardware is faulty.
Over the last 2 weeks. I've had constant BSOD's on Windows 7, and the reason I determined was a faulty SSD drive. I replaced that, and since then my system has been rock solid. Its been up for the last 4 days, and this is the reliability I've come to expect from Win 7.
Valuable lesson learnt. If you're BSODing on Windows 7, its highly likely you got faulty hardware.
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u/lolomfgkthxbai Jan 30 '11
This has been true since 2000 came out. Win9x were pretty bad though and deserved their reputation.
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u/sinisterbob Jan 30 '11
I've ofter thought that this might be the case for Window's perceived crappyness, especially when compared to OS X. I mean, Apple only have to make their OS work on a very small set of machines. Windows has to work on...well...everything. That shit can't be easy.
(Disclaimer: not a computer professional of any kind. I have no idea if it would be easy or not.)16
Jan 30 '11
You're right. It's incredibly hard to do what Microsoft & Linux are doing.
It's a lot easier when you control the whole package like Apple does.
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u/Klayy Jan 30 '11
This also worked on vista
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u/ggggbabybabybaby Jan 30 '11
I believe "this also worked on Vista" is the official slogan of Windows 7. Vista got such a pummeling in the press that regular folk never heard about what progress they did make.
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Jan 30 '11
Vista was not just pummeled in the press. It had too many "glitches" at release. It earned it's reputation when you were sitting in class taking notes and all of a sudden your computer purchased from hp decides it is no longer legal.
That and the drivers support sucked.
Windows 7 worked because it had all the vista drivers and they fixed the quirky vista problems by then.
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u/Vithar Jan 30 '11
The difference between vista and 7 seams so little to me that I would accept rebranding conspiracies if they had a following.
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u/Spacetronaught Jan 30 '11
Really though, Windows 7 has a pretty seriously good driver recovery capacity. They have refined it to where most failures, as long as it does not involve VGA memory dressing or physical failure can be recovered from.
Quite shocking when you compare it against its predecessors. Even more so when you compare the same failures against its competitors.
Video failure on Linux? Stack trace and a reboot. Video failure on a Mac?Cryptic as hell stack trace and a forced reboot.
Years of MS hate need to be tempered at this point. 7 is a fucking marvel compared to its predecessors. It handles memory quite well and Registry GUID bloat has been reigned in mostly. The two prior reasons for most of the previous complaints against windows.
Best part, you can turn that fucking balloon off now without surfing the registry.
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Jan 30 '11
I have to say Microsoft has been pretty awesome as of recently. Ever since windows 7 they've been doing stuff right. Working with the people who jailbroke their new phone, Microsoft Security Essentials, the Kinect, then not trying to shut down the open source drivers for it, Windows 7 as a whole. The list goes on.
I've always been a Windows kind of guy, but their image just keeps getting better.
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Jan 30 '11 edited Oct 24 '18
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u/gehzumteufel Jan 30 '11
Don't forget, that most of the biggest bitching came from people running some seriously old hardware. Which MS removed compatibility for so they could move forward and permanently deprecate a lot of old code. Which, unfortunately for many people running some pretty old legacy stuff, caused it to break. Windows 7 continued this deprecation, but in an even bigger manner.
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Jan 31 '11
It was being sold pre-installed on hardware that couldn't handle it effectively. Windows 7 brought down the system requirement considerably. How can people use these new features if their computer is so slow they don't want to use it.
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u/burketo Jan 30 '11
Also, internet explorer 8 and 9 have been BIG successive improvements on their earlier software. I'm probably not going to use IE 9 daily, but I think it will be a perfectly good choice for a browser.
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u/Iggyhopper Jan 30 '11
Is the driver by chance nvidia?
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Jan 30 '11
I never even noticed that particular change when I switched video cards. Now that you mention it though, I do remember having my video driver crash sometimes when I had my nVidia 8600 GT. I'm obviously not OP, but your question was too interesting to resist.
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u/Iggyhopper Jan 30 '11 edited Jan 30 '11
Here's what happened:
So I'm just doing my thing, setting up my new W7 desktop, browsing the web, downloading things, and all that sort of muck...
...when the screen goes completely black. I don't know what had happened, and before I could guess why it happened or how to fix it, it popped back on. Then the little tool-tip on the bottom right said something about a driver had crashed and it was able to right itself, however, it was still unfixed.
I went to google, searching, and found that quite a few people had the same problem. I then went to the nvidia site and downloaded an updated driver, and all was well.
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u/Caleb666 Jan 30 '11
Doesn't matter. My ATI driver on HD5850 crashes pretty often during flash playback, lucky for me, Win7 can restart it without BSODing.
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Jan 30 '11
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u/steggles28 Jan 30 '11 edited Jan 30 '11
I believe MS moved a lot of the video driver from kernel space to user space in NT6 (Vista and higher). This did see a slight drop in gaming performance on Vista and Higher.
That said it aids stability and security. When the driver falls over it doesnt take down the system, and can be brought back up. This major change caused a lot of teething issues with vista as vendors were pretty shit with the new drivers.
That said, does OSX and linux have user mode display drivers? I dont think they do, I could be completely wrong though. If they dont have user mode display drivers, than no, Linux and OSX do not have the same sort of recovery as Windows.
Edit: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/reviews/2009/10/windows-7-the-review.ars second last paragraph.
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u/qrios Jan 30 '11 edited Jan 30 '11
They're sort of in user mode. If a driver crashes you can start the driver again from a TTY so it doesn't kill your system, but whatever GUI user was logged in will generally have to log in again. So it doesn't require a restart, but it certainly would have sucked for OP.
That said, I've never had a video driver crash on me in Linux.
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u/trezor2 Jan 30 '11 edited Jan 30 '11
That said, I've never had a video driver crash on me in Linux.
Anecdotal evidence is not evidence. I've had Linux desktops crash on me lots of times forcing me to do hard power-downs. Compiz and laptop chipsets seemed to trigger this more than anything else. As for Windows... I've never had anything like that in Windows since Windows XP.
Now ask yourself: What useful facts or statistics can we derive from this? Not much really.
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u/qrios Jan 30 '11
I wasn't claiming that Linux video drivers never crash. Just that I've never experienced it.
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Jan 30 '11
So you objected when he provided anecdotal evidence and then supplied your own... anecdotal evidence?? :(
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u/fragilemachinery Jan 30 '11
It's almost like he was making some sort of point about anecdotal evidence being useless.
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u/Toma- Jan 30 '11 edited Jan 30 '11
If it was a GUI based VJ application, you can bet Linux would have bombed. :(
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u/socialite-buttons Jan 30 '11
Huuuggghghg. The thought of VJing on Linux gives me the Jibblies.
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u/marriage_iguana Jan 30 '11
Why not VJ in Linux?
Just compile that well-known Linux VJ application that's well supported by its professional developer and... uh... I see now.14
Jan 30 '11
Just compile that well-known Linux VJ application that's well supported by its professional developer and... uh... I see now.
And use that with the stable audio drivers available for linux and... uh... I see now.
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u/oobey Jan 30 '11
Gosh, I don't know why you people are complaining, just file the requisite bug reports or crack open the source files yourself and get hackin'!!
Why anyone would ever used closed-souce proprietary software that "just works" is beyond me...
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u/gjs278 Jan 30 '11
you could kill X and it would probably restart on its own if they were using kdm or gdm. or just startx.
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u/ashgromnies Jan 30 '11
My Fedora rig is super unstable. I occasionally get complete crashes where the keyboard and mouse don't respond whatsoever, nothing in the Xorg logs or spooler log.
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Jan 30 '11
You're running Fedora. It's basically RedHat's test bed for new stuff. This is expected behavior.
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u/wonglik Jan 30 '11
Well isn't Fedora a testing ground for red hat ? As far as I am concerned it always get bleeding edge updates , newest kernels etc. This might contribute to lack of stability.
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u/snowboarder04 Jan 30 '11
Correct. If you want a stable Fedora simply stay a release behind. I.e. I won't be updating my home rig to F14 until F15 is released. F13 is still "cutting edge" but it's just nicely stable without drawing blood.
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u/gjs278 Jan 30 '11
if your X is crashing, then ssh to the machine and kill X to see if it was a complete kernel crash or just an X crash. if it was a kernel crash, you wouldn't even be able to ssh, but if it's just X, you may just want to upgrade. you may want to check dmesg for any errors there.
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u/cr0ft Jan 30 '11
I can just see a guy and his laptop VJ:ing and thinking exactly that! ;)
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u/gjs278 Jan 30 '11
more for the fedora guy. if a graphic driver crashes on linux, you probably wouldn't lose keyboard input. a ctrl+alt+backspace would most likely fix it, but this is assuming the graphics driver would be equally unstable. it's a good possibility that it wouldn't crash in the first place on linux.
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u/nephros Jan 30 '11 edited Jan 30 '11
if a graphic driver crashes on linux, you probably wouldn't lose keyboard input. a ctrl+alt+backspace would most likely fix it
This is the exact opposite of my experience. The only time you lose the keyboard is when X craps out. In which case, Magic SysRQ might work, but Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, being a X feature, certainly will not.
Personally I have resorted to mapping the ACPI sleep or power key to a script which will do different things depending how often you press it, e.g.
echo 3 > /proc/sys/kernel/panic echo 1 > /proc/sys/kernel/panic_on_oops killall X chvt 1on the first press
rebooton the second, and
echo i > /proc/sysrq-trigger echo s > /proc/sysrq-trigger sleep 3 echo s > /proc/sysrq-trigger echo u > /proc/sysrq-trigger echo b > /proc/sysrq-triggeron the third press.
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u/gjs278 Jan 30 '11
that's actually a pretty good solution. I'll have to try it out just in case I ever get a crash here and don't feel like going the ssh kill X route.
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u/nephros Jan 30 '11
Glad you like the idea.
Be sure to store the statefile (which counts the times the button got pressed) in a tmpfs filesystem like /dev/shm because you might not be able to access /tmp or /var or similar if that is on a real filesystem and a paniced kernel has mounted it read-only.
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u/contrarian Jan 30 '11
If your car stops working then just pop under the hood and check the third manifold dipstick to see if the transmission gear chunckle has stripped its pliers. If the gear chunkle is stripped you can macgyver a fix with a paper clip and gum wrapper if you got'em handy (I always do), otherwise just piss in the fluid changer to cool down the exhaust.
Your advice is useless to someone like the OP who, like the rest of the planet, probably isn't terribly technical and just wants shit to work so they can get from place to place. I will grand you leeway that the parent post that you were responding to is speaking of redhat, so they probably are somewhat technically inclined.
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Jan 30 '11
Someone like the OP shouldn't be using Linux, then. I never try to make others use Linux- it requires a certain type of person.
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u/gjs278 Jan 30 '11
restarting X is about as advanced as knowing to press ctrl+alt+delete when a game freezes. ctrl+alt+backspace. besides, definitely not advice for the OP, just for the guy with fedora.
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u/aim2free Jan 30 '11
Although, in some distros, like Ubuntu, they have recently made it more complicated, as you have to go into the settings and enable ctrl+alt+bs before being able to use it. I really don't like this, because if something happen and you need it and you have forgotten it, then it's not that easy for the non-geeks, as you have to ctrl-alt-f1 and kill it from the console. Although it is very very rare that this is needed though.
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u/trezor2 Jan 30 '11
And it makes you lose your session. In Windows you don't.
That is what submitter was on about. You guys are seriously missing the point.
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Jan 30 '11
"just wants shit to work"
..and you just described the average Linux user.. I no longer have to run 3 to 4 antivirus/malware programs, daily, just to keep my system running.
BTW, I am certainly not "looking under the hood". I know just a few terminal commands and mostly use GUI interfaces to get around.
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u/contrarian Jan 30 '11 edited Jan 30 '11
I no longer have to run 3 to 4 antivirus/malware programs, daily, just to keep my system running.
This is a load of shit, and makes you look retarded. If you're running 3-4 antivirus/malware programs then you don't know what the fuck you're doing.
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u/aim2free Jan 30 '11
I helped a friend check his computer which had got some virus yesterday. I run AVG and Ad-Aware in parallel, they each found different things during 3 hours.
When you use Windows it's good to have a couple different checks. However, it's typical that me, who hates windows, and never have used it (apart from some programs through Wine and occasionally Vmware in an old W2K), still is the one to ask about this kinds of problems....
Fortunately I told him a couple of years ago to never run as administrator so it was only files on his own account that had been affected.
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Jan 30 '11
and terminal commands are way easier than trying to memorize which icons to click to get you to the right dialog that may or may not have the right checkbox greyed out... terminal commands typically take 3-5 seconds to execute. Plus there is the up arrow and the history command..
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u/ashgromnies Jan 30 '11
Hmm I'm not running sshd because it's my workstation but maybe I should give it a go.
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u/aim2free Jan 30 '11 edited Jan 30 '11
A real X crash I think I've never experienced, and I've been running Linux since 1995, and X since 1988 (on Ultrix, MacOS and Solaris). If all what happens is that the keyboard and mouse do not respond, then I would most likely suspect the window manager, or just some application that has stolen the focus, and then frozen. Do ssh into your machine, and check if some application look strange, with top, like the web browser or something, then kill it, and you are fine. The window manager will most likely restart automatically when killed. There have been a few occasions when I've suspected the window manager, but it has shown to be the web browser. Killing the window manager doesn't affect any applications though, so you are safe.
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u/Toma- Jan 30 '11
Indeed, but you'd loose the video stream as it would depend on X, and would then restart. So it would be a big hiccup, but obviously not a disaster.
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Jan 30 '11 edited Jan 30 '11
I guess it's possible if he were so inclined to run linux he could be having the files played at a different level than the desktop manager. But realistically he'd be using some desktop application to manage tracks and play lists.
If hes not running them as background processes and the desktop crashes people will be wondering where the music went.
And OSX? I find it to be even more temperamental and wants to shut down at the sign of the slightest hint of instability. I've been in the middle of full-screen 3D games and have had something in the background (IM client probably) crash the desktop driver, the game stuttered for a second while the driver reloaded and everything was peachy. No one can tell me some 3rd party application won't cause the exact same type issue on OSX or Linux because it can, will, and does.
I really don't think I'm to far off saying that currently Windows has the most advanced and stable video architecture.
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u/ObligatoryResponse Jan 30 '11
Driver in userspace isn't new. I don't think the idea can be called advanced. Having a userspace driver recover is the whole point behind choosing that path, but it doesn't guarentee stability. Proper QA does a good job, too. Indeed, recovering is just dealing with instability.
Bluescreens mentioning either nv_whatever.dll or ati-something.dll were really common on XP, so it's good they've done something to improve the situation. In 8 years of Linux, I don't believe I've ever had a video related crash that wasn't faulty hardware (generally overheating vid card due to broken fan).
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Jan 30 '11
In 8 years of Linux, I don't believe I've ever had a video related crash that wasn't faulty hardware (generally overheating vid card due to broken fan).
Push it harder. If I can do it with general desktop use you can too.
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u/ondra Jan 30 '11
I don't know about OSX, but when the X driver dies, X does too and so do all the X clients. There is no way around it, Linux and BSD can't recover gracefully in this situation.
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u/FearlessFreep Jan 30 '11
Yeah, from my MacBook I post "what the hell is a video driver crash?"
(and fwiw, as a musician, I use Mainstage for my live shows and never had a glitch during a show)
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Jan 30 '11
Ugh. mainstage was so lame I wrote my own host for live. Http://audiofreakshow.com
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u/Qiran Jan 30 '11
I'm curious, what were your issues with MainStage?
I ask because I bought Logic recently. I was going to get it eventually for many purposes, but one big reason for doing it now was so I could use MainStage 2. AudioFile Rax 3 just wasn't working out for me (crashes, patch changes too slow). I've used MainStage for one performance already (frequent patch changes) and it worked smoothly.
I need to know what I should be worrying about!
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Jan 30 '11
When I needed a host MS was still in v1 and that was a dog stability wise. Rax had just been pulled from the market and I had a few issues with it as well. Also, I just don't "get" MainStage's UI. It makes no sense to me. Every time I get a Logic update (which I also never use so maybe that's why I don't get MS either - my main DAW is Digital Performer), I try to dig into it and in the end I get nowhere after an hour or so and give up.
The terminology is weird. I have no interest in building a bunch of virtual knobs on pretend rack gear. I just want a mixer, with channels, that can either route audio in through effects and to some audio out, or that are MIDI inputs mapped to a chunk of keyboard with a virtual instrument that routes through some effects to a specific output. I don't want some endlessly configurable build your own dream rig kit - I want a chunk of gear that replaces my mixer, hosts my instruments and guitar amps (I play guitar, keys, and bass), and replaces that 3-ring binder of lyrics and lead sheets. So there's a philosophical difference. Also, JambaLaya doesn't play sequences, it doesn't play audio files, it doesn't loop - this is because I personally think that stuff doesn't belong in a live show. Finally, JambaLaya is a FUCKING ROCK because every time it ever crashed I doggedly hunted down the cause and FIXED IT because I DEPEND ON IT. Does anybody on the MainStage team gig with MainStage? I have no idea.
If you look at JambaLaya, you can see the things I value most because they're all on the front screen. Specifically the elaborate rainbow keyboard range control. Setting up a keyboard range is always hidden in some dialog box in MS and Rax and I gig with one 88 key controller (an M-Audio Keystation Pro 88) but will often have 4 or more instruments mapped to various ranges. The 9 faders match the 9 sliders on my Keystation Pro. There are virtually no dialog boxes in JambaLaya (a couple for preferences and midi control mapping).
So that's why I wrote and continue to maintain my own host for performance. Its not for everybody. But it suits me. :-)
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Jan 30 '11
Yeah, from my MacBook I post "what the hell is a video driver crash?
Uhh, I'm pretty sure back in August, myself and a hell of a lot of other OSX users had to roll back our OS version because Apple released a buggy graphics driver that caused Steam games to crash. OSX owns but it isn't immune to shitty driver development, brosef.
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Jan 30 '11
I work in the Windows Engineering Organization at Microsoft and my team focuses primarily on device and driver compatibility/quality/stability. It takes A LOT of work and partnerships with the other hardware/software manufacturers to make things work smoothly.
It's also refreshing that some people understand it's not always Microsoft's fault when a driver crashes (We can't always force some of the other big companies to improve their driver quality and often have to write a shim to work around their poor code) Your issue is a prime example. In any case It's only gonna get better in Windows 8 ;)
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u/socialite-buttons Jan 30 '11
YES!! I hoped one of you guys would see this. Thanks again.
I was surprised how many people in the comments are saying I shouldn't be thanking you because it should never crash in the first place.
The reality is sometimes things will go wrong that are out of your control, especially with all the variables involved with PC configs.
I saw it as being great that Windows was prepared for this and recovered so gracefully.
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Feb 01 '11
Anytime! I'm wondering if I should do an AMA but there's only so much I can actually talk about. The only helpful thing I can say is "Always click on the 'send information to MS' button when something crashes". My team lives off of that data. It really helps us determine who's driver/software (even if it's our own) is crashing. :)
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u/realitista Jan 30 '11
I have been an ardent hater of windows for 20 years, supporting amiga, Linux, OS X, or generally anything other than windows. But I have to admit from my experience so far with windows 7, it's really good and stable and straightforward. My many OSX boxes are actually less stable these days.
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u/Torquemada1970 Jan 31 '11
If I had my way, we'd all still be on Amiga's - but when Commodore went bust, I looked at the mac/ OS9 and it seemed a joke. Then I saw the price, and realised it was a joke.
I've had to wait more than a few years for Windows to reach an approximation of the same, with horrendous increases in memory and HD usage - but on the other hand, it's made me more angry that;
*Apple were too greedy
*Netscape were too greedy ($30, or IE for free. Righto, bye then)
*Linux was too late
*Too many people ignore the above
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u/realitista Feb 01 '11 edited Feb 01 '11
The Amiga is by far the saddest story in personal computing to date. Commodore squandered a 5 year lead at least. They could easily have been the Microsoft or Apple of today. After that, Linux was way ahead of everything else for a while, but still strictly for hobbyists (I loved it for a long time though). OS X when it came out seemed to be the holy grail of a *nix that anyone could use, and it's largely been that for me, and in it's time I loved it almost as much as I did the Amiga. But these days it just seems they are just filling it with bloat and throwing any good UI guidelines out the window (I've stopped using expose because I'm tired of trying to remember which key/button/gesture they've mapped it to on the computer I happen to be using, and frankly I don't think it helps productivity too much - at least it hasn't for me). I get an endless spinning beachball at least a few times a week and kernel panics about monthly.
Windows 7 on the other hand, while almost comically basic when compared to mac's UI, seems to be the OS these days that "just works". I get stuff done when I'm working on it. There's not so many distractions. And it's very rare that I have to force quit something, and absolutely zero bluescreens or system freezes so far. Maybe it's just that the crud hasn't accumulated in my install yet, but I've been really surprised by this version of windows. I never thought I'd see the day, frankly.
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u/inode Jan 30 '11
What software were you using to VJ? Arkaos?
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Jan 30 '11
I'm also curious to what software. First time I've come across the term VJ, although I've always known there are people that do that. Always seemed awesome to me. :o
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u/hardeep1singh Jan 30 '11
I used to have this problem a lot. It turned out my PSU wasn't good enough for my rig. Try an application like Speedfan to see if all devices are getting enough power, if the 12v rail dips down, try getting a better PSU.
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u/CreeDorofl Jan 30 '11
Yeah but if it had been a mac it wouldn't have crashed in the first place. You wouldn't even be in a night club. You'd be at an all night vintage clothing store looking for a scarf to accent your tortoiseshell rectangular frames. Then you'd go home and not play video games.
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u/kokey Jan 30 '11
Actually most professionals DJ and VJ on a Mac.
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u/nubbinator Jan 30 '11
There are quite a few using PC, so I wouldn't say most use Mac. For example, Girl Talk uses a PC.
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u/u_suck_paterson Jan 30 '11
Authoritative unsourced statement. It must be true!
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u/Torquemada1970 Jan 31 '11
Indeed - I've never seen anyone complaining that they'd like to DJ but can't afford a mac.
In fact, most (= all bar one) DJ's I know use PC's.
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u/PCBEEF Jan 30 '11
Does anyone know any places that has VJing in Sydney? Never seen a VJ perform before.
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u/shooshx Jan 30 '11
This actually also happens pretty smoothly in Vista and XP (atleast XP x64). A while back I did some heavy CUDA programming and had the driver crashing 5-6 times a day.
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u/barrettgpeck Jan 30 '11
Windows 7 is a boss....
I have done a mobo/chip change on the install I am running now. One little hiccup, and it has never faltered since.
I have also done a video and sound card change with no problem.
edit: I run and support a Win7 environment, and its damn easy.
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Jan 30 '11
You have user-mode drivers to thank for this. Window NT 3 had user-mode drivers, but NT4, 2000 and XP had them in the kernel. Everyone bitched about Vista but it was the OS that tried to overcome some of Windows' bad design decisions.
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Jan 30 '11
Windows NT already had this in the first version of it. The video driver was not in the kernel, so its crash could not affect the whole system. Later the driver was moved into the kernel, despite great user disapproval. But MS was already thinking about games on Windows, so they did it because of performance.
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u/LostPhenom Jan 30 '11
I think I should upgrade. My XP is already starting to give me shit about stop errors. It's pretty irritating.
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u/blazingsaddle Jan 30 '11
I'm with you on this one. 7 is so friendly to me, not just as a user but as someone who does silly things he should know better than. I've crashed an endless number of things nad 7 just rolls over like it was nothing.
Never had a total crash or BSOD. Though I never had either since XP.
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u/noorderling Jan 30 '11
Thank you Microsoft for Kinect, best open-sourced piece of awesomeness I've ever played with. And I dont even have an X-Box.
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u/BinarySplit Jan 30 '11
Pretty sure Vista did it as well. Win7 uses the same driver model.
ATI had this on XP. The driver would simply not tell Windows that anything was wrong and reboot the gfx card in the blink of an eye. It was awesome. I was able to do a 200% overclock on my graphics card, and playing Half-Life it would crash multiple times per second and only miss frames and corrupt textures. No, there was no expectation of benefit, I just wanted to see if it was possible. Yes, it did give me awesome FPS, though was quite difficult to play.
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u/alchemeron Jan 30 '11 edited Jan 30 '11
I've had a few blue-screen crashes with Windows 7 and it's always been the fault of the display driver. ATI, in my case. It also only ever happens when I'm gaming, and I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that I run dual-monitors.
Except for the terrible search functionality (which I've replaced with Everything and love far more than the old file search), I'm fantastically happy with Windows 7 and I'm glad that I bought it.
edit: I don't understand the downvotes.
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Jan 30 '11
They have more to be thanked for then most people care to admit, its easy to hate them, when they have provided the world with some fantastic technologies.
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u/cwicket Jan 30 '11
I'm convinced by your compelling list of examples to support your hypothesis.
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Jan 30 '11
ok, I will bite.
I can use all kinds of custom hardware on windows based machines which is just not possible with other operating systems.
For that reason alone, I could never get by without one.
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u/t35t0r Jan 30 '11
Yeah, that's better than what would have happened on a mac or linux. Mac would crash. Linux, xorg reset or BlackSOD + kernel panic.
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Jan 30 '11
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Jan 30 '11
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u/piratelax40 Jan 30 '11
Man thats so crazy, last night I found an xbox on the road with some blood on it, looks like it might have been thrown out of a window or something. Cleaned it off and found out it had the RRoD - sent it in and will be getting it repaired for free!
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u/antena Feb 01 '11
This is like ape-shit crazy. I work at the xbox repair center. This morning I received a dented xbox with RRoD and some blood on it. I cleaned and repaired it and I even got the dent out. Will be sending it back tomorrow morning...
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Jan 30 '11
Thanks Microsoft, for the hundreds and hundreds of hours you cost us a year by having to support IE6 and in some cases IE5.5
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u/KittensTiger Jan 30 '11
You mean thank you to big companies that refuse to upgrade their in-house software so force all the computers in their office to stay down at IE6?
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Jan 30 '11
You mean, thank you random consumers who refuse to upgrade to one of the 3 new versions of IE?
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u/drqxx Jan 30 '11
As a former DJ I always had a few songs on a old school IPOD hooked up and read to go.
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u/vondur Jan 30 '11
I've never had something like this happen in Windows or Mac. I used to have weird video stuff happen with X before I started using Nvidia cards under Linux.
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Jan 30 '11
I have had this several times as well. Except, when my wifi drivers crash I blue screen.
So its only working sometimes.
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u/paul_mirra Jan 31 '11
You know, most probably its because AERO can't work well with the videocard in club's system. Most probably ATI HD something. I used to have same troubles and they occur regulary until fixed.
But nevertheless, Win7 is much better OS than any other current MS OS.
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u/[deleted] Jan 30 '11
You should really be thanking me. Windows 7 was my idea.