Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

The things that we take for granted

Last weekend i went and bought a new laptop (actually, this is my first laptop). So, as i plugged it in and connected to the net, Vista started downloading updates and installing them. And then i started thinking - what happens if one of these updates will simply crash the OS on the next boot?

The implicit assumption of any update to the operating system is that it at least boots (if everything is OK with the hardware). For the past 8 years that i've been using Windows (from 3.11 to NT, 98, XP, 2003 and Vista) i've seen the blue screen of death only once, and that was because of bad RAM sticks (after our IT department replaced them, it all went back to normal). So you kind of take it for granted that when you switch the power on, the OS will come alive and greet you with the full functioning desktop at your disposal. But just think about myriads of small things that can go wrong, including the boot, startup processes, login, drivers, mouse and keyboard, anti-virus, firewall etc. The operating system simply can't fail.

I don't know what's the testing process inside Microsoft for releasing the automated updates, but the end result is that it simply works. They are downloaded, installed, and on some occasions (which are far less frequent than they used to be) OS reboots. And then the magic happens - it all comes back to life. No exception stack traces to copy and send to the developer. No magic key sequence to bypass a faulted module. No praying that it won't crash. It just works.

And this is a technical feat worthy of praise. Such a gigantic multi-layered beast and zero tolerance for startup errors. Makes me think twice about asking people to send stack traces when something goes wrong...

Comments

• I have used Windows from 3.11 to Vista and we definitely don't have the same experience. Things got much better over the years, but "zero tolerance" is way too strong when I think about the problem I had with various Windows flavors.

  Posted by: gfx on March 08, 2007 at 11:55 AM

• I'm referring only to the startup phase when i'm talking about zero tolerance. Everything else is much less harmful. Say, one time i ejected the DVD and Vista SideBar crashed and i had to click the tray icon and re-enable it. But that's minor compared to OS not starting up at all.

  Posted by: kirillcool on March 08, 2007 at 12:47 PM

• I was also referring to the startup phase. One more than one occasion I just couldn't boot Windows. Mind you, the safe mode was always working but once.

  Posted by: gfx on March 08, 2007 at 05:48 PM

• Same here -- I've had updates hose Windows before. Back in the 9X days I've had them screw it up so badly that it didn't even boot into safe mode, but fortunately XP's safe mode seems much... safer.

  I've never had a Mac OS update kill any of my systems, but I'm sure someone's had that experience as well.

  Posted by: enicholas on March 08, 2007 at 07:59 PM

• I've been using google reader to read blogs for a while, and I tried adding your rss feed to it, but since you share only a very small portion of your post thru the rss feed, it requires me to visit your website, even to read your stuff.

  I like what you write, and would like to continue reading, but it would be great if I can use a reader of my choice. Can you think about enabling full feeds?!

  Posted by: shvelmur on March 08, 2007 at 10:36 PM

• shvelmur - this would be a question to the java.net staff.

  Posted by: kirillcool on March 08, 2007 at 11:01 PM

• I've been using MS operating systems since DOS 3.21, and more than once I've struggled with hanging systems, BSODs and total data losses on my connected hard drives. Yes, I definitely have to agree, that things got better. One astonishing experience I had with Windows XP lies only a few months back:
  I had a video file, that hung my XP, when I tried to play it. I had to use the reset button to bring it back to life. I tried a few configuration changes to make the file play, but eventually gave up. After another two weeks of continuous operation I had to reboot and after the system came back up suddenly many thing went wrong, starting with the RPC service, yes the one needed by so many other programs and system services, which did no longer start. I quickly realized that I had lost about a 100 files on my boot volume. So I did a reboot with chkdsk. I did not help. Then I tried to boot from my XP install dvd and run chkdsk from there, which resulted in desaster: It reported almost every file as being corrupted and deleted it. After it was done I was able to boot from dvd and look into my boot volume via command line. Well it was almost empty. As a last resort I tried to restore my system via the System Restore Point (SRP) feature of XP. I have to say, I did not expect this to work, but it actually worked surprisingly good. The reboot after activating the last SRP worked as if nothing ever happened. All my files were visible again, RPC did work. OK, my registry had been returned to a state 3 weeks old and my Firefox preferences were lost, together with about 5 other unimportant files, but everything else worked fine again. So praise the MS developers who designed SRP, I think they really did it right!
  One thing that I learned from that experience: Always do a full chkdsk immediately after you had to force a reboot through reset from a hanging system. Don't let it run for two more weeks, so that file system has time to get totally corrupted.
  

  Posted by: rullrich on March 09, 2007 at 11:19 AM

• And then i started thinking - what happens if one of these updates will simply crash the OS on the next boot

  Actually, many updates create restore points automatically (if you didn't switch this option off). Also you may create restore point manually. Unfortunately, I had a chance to test this functionality on WinXP -- it also "just works" ;)

  VS

  Posted by: vsilaev on March 12, 2007 at 09:40 AM

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