Windows platform stability (was: Stability horrible in CODE) -- CODE400-L

>Has there been anyone who's made the migration
>from 98SE to 2000 who can testify to the stability?

I'll make one broad post on Microsoft OS stability in general and then shut
up.

I've been playing in the PC space since the MITS Altair.  I've built S-100
machines and written my own kernel (the hard way.)  My experience with MS is
therefore a bit atypical.  When I got an IBM PC running DOS 2.1(?) I was
amazed at how often the thing went casters-up.  Then I started doing some
research on the boot process they used.  After some determined tinkering
with AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS, I was able to find the magic driver load
sequence that kept the machine going all day long.

Some of that early tinkering and experimentation still applies today.  High
resolution video and sound cards came somewhat late to the IBM PC-compatible
platform, and have been historically a sore spot.  The drivers just don't
work that well in combination with other software, and failures can be
spectacularly unpredictable.  That's why loading the drivers in the right
order can be helpful, even today.  When I get a new box, one of the first
things I do is hit the registry and make sure that I know how the drivers
are getting loaded.  Nowadays that's not an easy task but my work PC (Win98
2E) stays running for weeks at a time.  I had the same experience with Win
3.1 (386sx-33) and Win 95 (Pentium 75).  I have never seen an off the shelf
install of any MS OS run that well.

The other major contributor to overall stability seems to be "minimise
memory leaks."  When I browse an IBM manual in PDF form, I generally
download it and view it offline.  When done with that manual, I close the
document window but not Acrobat.  I minimise Acrobat, expecting that I'll be
using it again soon.  Most definitely, I don't open/close IE all day long.
No matter what version, IE has memory leaks.  I open my Notes client once
and leave it open all day long.  When I get in tomorrow, I'll look at my
free resources - if it drops below 50% I'll re-boot as a prophylactic
measure.  That's a PII-450 with 128 megs of RAM.

At home, I was the only user on the machine for a long while, so I kept my
ancient Win 3.1 installation going.  When the kids started pounding on it, I
was pleasantly surprised to see that it ran just fine with a once in the
morning reboot.  I kept is for so long that they couldn't play the games
they wanted, so I upgraded to NT4.0 with a boot menu for true DOS.  THAT
took some tinkering with, but once done, I had separate logins for all 4 of
us, and the stability was quite good.  I had a Blue Screen once a week or
so.  I recently went to Win 2K - after rooting out the IM clients and Real
Player from automatically starting it's remarkably stable.  Maybe once a
month it'll go Blue Screen, even with the kids and Mom banging away on it.
That's on a P-200 with 128megs of RAM.

I do NOT think that Code in and of itself is unstable - I had a devil of a
time with Notes and Access until I got the right sound card drivers and then
my life was Much Better.  Yes, sound card drivers.  Some goofy conflict with
the video in combination with THIS app using THAT memory while THAT app
tries to use THIS memory.  A little bit busy with a .pdf download, an
interrupt services a little late and crunch.  The thing that surprises me is
not that people see crashes, but that the thing actually runs at all.  Fire
up a debugger sometime and look at all the processes that are supposed to
honour gentleman's agreements and play nice together.  To this day, I do not
believe that the PC is ready for off the shelf use.  I think we're still in
the experimenter's age, and if you want to run complex apps, you should do
some serious reading and tinkering to tune your particular machine for your
particular mix.  That's why some people (like me) report Code being stable
and wonderful and others (like Mike) complain that it's terrible.  It's the
combination of memory leaks, drivers and application mix all taken together
that contribute to the situation.

All done.  Sorry for the bandwidth.