RE: tlug: FW: Windows 95

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "jb" == Jonathan Byrne--3Web <jq@example.com> writes:

    jb> We have several NT machines here (for internal use; our public
    jb> servers are all UNIX boxes) and we don't have those kinds of
    jb> problems on any of them.  I'd say that more likely there is
    jb> either a hardware or a configuration problem with your NT
    jb> machine.
[ ... ]
    jb> The people in your shop who like NT may not know what's wrong
    jb> with that system, but I guarantee that something is.  NT does
    jb> not normally behave that way.

Defining hardware health with respect to running NT without problems?
That's exactly what NT itself does.

I've done stuff almost as bad as `rm -rf /' and I've had disks crash
and bad media cost me data.  But the only software that I know has
cost me data is Windows NT.

In one case, I upgraded Windows NT from the beta version to the public
release of 3.1, and the public release version of the BusLogic driver
didn't bother to check the manufacturer ID before using undocumented
BusLogic API extensions on my AMI FastSCSI card.  1.2 GB, randomized.

In another case, due to a hardware flaw NT refused to finish coming up 
(it bloody well knew there was an ethernet card there and it wasn't
going to boot before the card talked to it), so I power cycled.  Lost
the NT configuration files, somehow.  But no user data.  That box is
now running Linux.

You can argue that neither case was NT's fault.  And Linux has its
driver problems (the AIC7xxx is a case in point).  But when I booted
Linux on the bad ethercard machine, Don Becker's Tulip driver told me
"there seems to be a broken tulip card there, chipset identified but
init sequence timed out" (that's how I identified the HW problem) and
the boot finished gracefully.  (The Linux BusLogic driver announces
that "this is an AMI FastSCSI" on boot, too.)  Even if that had hung,
I could boot from floppy and start playing around, mounting partitions
r/o, insmod'ing stuff, and so on.

If an NT box has a hardware problem, you may very well have to boot
DOS to identify it!

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