What To Do When Windows Vista Crashes: Little-Known Recovery Strategies

Iria · Jun 30, 2007, 08:58 PM

Source: Information Week
________
I've finally got a compliment of technical substance to pay to Windows Vista, beyond the kudos it has justifiably received for the glitzy, Mac-like look and feel it has brought to the PC platform.

The good news is that Vista, for all its annoyances--including slow search and intrusive security warnings--is much more robust and harder to break than any previous Microsoft operating system.

Interestingly, even the infamous "blue screen of death" has largely been thrown onto the software slag heap. (Lock-ups during the installation process are now heralded with a blank black screen!)

Unfortunately, crashes haven't been totally banished. More ominously, because Vista is packed with many more features and takes much longer to install than earlier OSes, when it does fail, you've got a time-consuming crisis on your hands.

WaltC · Jul 1, 2007, 11:19 AM

At first I thought this might be an interesting article, but...yawn...it's just another Windows-disinformation piece written by an obvious Mac zealot who thinks he's "helping Apple" in some bizarre way by writing a lot of tripe about various versions of Windows. He thinks that because he disguises his disinformation as "information" that he's being clever. I feel sorry for the authors of such pieces whenever I have the misfortune of reading their work. It's sad to see anyone with such a narrow frame of experience that he feels compelled to defend it by the use of disinformation.

Like other people in the world, my own computing experience is broad and multi-platform. As such, I worked with Macs in depth for a couple of years--and with Amigas for much longer than a couple of years--and with virtually everything ever made for x86 for much longer than even that. All these systems crashed at one time or another. That's why I can say with absolute authority that *Macs crash.* I recall them crashing fairly often, in fact. Does this mean that Macs are bad, or worse than any other system? Of course not. Every computer OS ever made will crash now and then. The idea , though, is to keep the frequency of that event as low as absolutely possible. So...

Here are a few ways for a person to discern whether what he's reading is truly a technology article containing valuable information, or whether it's a propaganda piece written by well-meaning but nearly clueless platform zealots who wish to bash other platforms without appearing to bash them, if you know what I mean. Again, these folks must imagine they are being very sly and clever, but to me they just seem so transparent that their work sticks out like a sore thumb and is nigh indigestible.

Clues to unmasking the clueless:

1) Often even the title of such pieces is revealing, especially when the title fixes a rare negative event in a context that implies that such an event is anything but rare, and is likely to be frequent, in fact. This article, for instance, is entitled: "What To Do When Windows Vista Crashes: Little-Known Recovery Strategies." The implication conveyed by the title is that Vista is going to crash often so you need to know about these "little known strategies" for your own protection.

In fact, they aren't strategies at all, but rather utility *programs* which Microsoft includes in Vista Ultimate--and some of these are utilities that have a much wider purpose than being used only when "Vista crashes." Either the author doesn't know this, or care. If the intent of the article had been to convey information instead of disinformation, a far better title would have been: "Under the Hood of Vista Ultimate: Backup and Recovery Utilities."

2) When the title promises information about a particular technology, but the article itself veers into frequent comparative comments about another technology not mentioned in the title. In this case, the author pretends to be presenting information about Vista, but in the very first paragraph he starts talking about "the Mac." Indeed, he starts indirectly praising the Mac and bashing Vista in the *very first sentence*:

"I've finally got a compliment of technical substance to pay to Windows Vista, beyond the kudos it has justifiably received for the glitzy, Mac-like look and feel it has brought to the PC platform."

He "finally" has arrived at a "compliment" of "technical substance" for Microsoft's latest OS? Immediately, he is--subconsciously--declaring himself, isn't he? Of course, as is true of all Mac zealots, he is so steeped in the propaganda he's been reading for so long that he honestly believes that Apple invented the "glitzy GUI look and feel" and everybody else, including and especially Microsoft, of course, is guilty of *copying it.*

He maintains this somewhat warped perspective even years after Apple dropped its "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft in recognition of the fact that Apple could not win it, and in recognition of Apple's dire need at the time for selling Microsoft the hundreds of millions of dollars of Apple stock that Microsoft purchased when Apple agreed to drop the suit. I mean, come on, even Steve Jobs himself has often been correctly quoted stating bluntly that the idea of the GUI he employed in the first Apple OS was not an original idea, but rather one that he borrowed from the Xerox Sparc.

Make no mistake about it: such language in the very first sentence of the article declares that the author is far less interested in providing you with information about Vista than he is in trying to sell you a Mac.

3)When the article promising information on a certain technology actually attacks that technology, and attacks it in an extremely prejudicial manner. For instance:

"The good news is that Vista, for all its annoyances--including slow search and intrusive security warnings--is much more robust and harder to break than any previous Microsoft operating system."

I wonder if the author has ever heard of Vista's indexing feature, which is designed to provide extremely fast searches? As before, I do not think the author either knows or cares about searches in Vista at all, as he seems content with making yet another declarative statement which he completely fails to justify. Then there's a disparaging mention of "intrusive security warnings," which presumably concerns UAC, and by which the author demonstrates yet again that he's either ignorant of the UAC function or simply doesn't care about it. The fact is that a user can *turn off* the "intrusive security warnings" should he find them intrusive, and should he wish to lower his security threshold. But of course that's yet another fact you won't learn in this article, isn't it?

Next:

"Interestingly, even the infamous "blue screen of death" has largely been thrown onto the software slag heap. (Lock-ups during the installation process are now heralded with a blank black screen!)"

OOoooh-h-h-h....a "blank black screen!" (exclamation point, no less!) You cannot find any more "retarded" criticism of Windows than the "blue screen of death" criticism, imo. I use the word "retarded" because to me that is just what this criticism is--it's so skewed, slanted, and just plain *wrong* that it is retarded.

A point that I made earlier is that Macs crash, too. And depending on the application you run on your Mac, your frequency of crashing will vary. Notice how in all his glitzy Mac promotional comments the author never bothers to mention this fact--and that's because he wants you to infer that Macs just don't crash. It's a thoroughly dishonest characterization, and that's all it is.

The "blue screen of death" in XP is an *error message* which attempts to simply explain to the user the origin of the offending software that caused the crash. It was "blue" simply to draw your attention. That is all it is and ever has been. Furthermore, an XP user can very easily set the OS so as *not to display* the "blue screen of death" but just to automatically reboot the system in the event of a crash, which is very similar to what happens when a Mac crashes. On the classical Macs I worked with for a couple of years, sometimes you'd get a very small error popup box that assigned the crash an error number but made no further attempt to identify it for you--you'd have to refer to a numbered "error index" outside of the computer to try and figure out what caused the crash--and then the machine rebooted after the crash. Sometimes, the Macs would just automatically reboot without even the very small popup box error number being displayed. Sometimes I'd have to manually reboot the Mac I was working with when it locked up.

So, why is it that Mac zealots love to talk about the XP "blue screen of death" without seeming to have any idea of what it is or that it can be turned off or how it correlates to what happens on a Mac when a Mac crashes? Beats me, truly. The mindset behind it is so skewed that I have difficulty in conceiving how someone could claim to be a "professional" with such a warped and limited base of knowledge.

The comment about the "blank black screen" is a red herring the author created just to yet again advance the concept he wants to impart--that Vista crashes constantly but Macs never do. It's just so sad to read this kind of thing. I've *never seen* the "blank black screen" the author exclaims about even once, and furthermore all Windows versions since XP are designed to automatically reboot during installation should the process hit a snag, and to try again should this unlikely event occur. It's never happened to me with Vista even once.

How about this:

"Unfortunately, crashes haven't been totally banished. More ominously, because Vista is packed with many more features and takes much longer to install than earlier OSes, when it does fail, you've got a time-consuming crisis on your hands."

Yes, unfortunately "crashes haven't been totally banished" from any OS currently being sold, including OSX. That's because human programmers are imperfect, the hardware is imperfect, the drivers for the hardware are imperfect, the software we run is imperfect, and so we concentrate on making systems as stable as it is humanly possible to do. As such, crashes on any OS on any platform will never, ever be "totally banished." My opinion is that the author doesn't care about any of that--all he cares about is writing some FUD about Vista.

My initial experience with Vista installation, and bear in mind that my first install was an upgrade install of Vista Ultimate right on top of my existing XP installation, took all of 25 minutes, and executed perfectly the very first time. I remember being surprised at how fast the upgrade install went, actually. It went roughly twice as fast as my WinXP upgrade installation went, as I recall.

Again, we see the author making declarative negative statements about Vista which he refuses to justify. I'm convinced that he's not about to let facts get in the way of his Vista bashing spree, disguised as "information." Very sad. It's also interesting that although the author talks about what he thinks will happen should a Vista installation fail--a "time-consuming crisis"--I notice that he never states that *his* Vista installation ever failed at all. That's probably because it didn't fail, wouldn't you think? I think that's obvious.

Only two more quotes to go:

"The upshot is that standard Vista installations are less likely to fail to boot than were standalone Windows 95/98/XP setups. Paradoxically, dual-boot configurations seem more prone to problems, but that'll be the subject of a second article."

First, notice how the author lumps "95/98/XP" together as if they all are the same OS and as if they all had the identical "problem" he talks about here? The fact is that XP was an order of magnitude better at avoiding a problem boot than was 95/98--for lots and lots of reasons I don't care to delve into here. The author yet again chooses ignorance over knowledge, but that's his problem--not mine...

Another factoid: since day one I've been running a dual-boot configuration of Vista32 and Vista 64, and I've never had the first problem booting to the partition of my choice--not even once.

4) You can spot a FUD piece a mile away when the assertion made in the title is refuted by the author's text inside the article itself.

"Vista also is more resistant to damage to key files. Indeed, my original plan was to retrace Langa's XP path for my Vista article and induce a crash by damaging the crucial "hal.dll" file. Thanks to Vista's improved protections, even though I had admin privileges, I couldn't touch it. (On the other hand, my hal.dll test exposed the achingly slow way search runs in Vista. I found the hal.dll file manually by going to directly C:/Windows/System32, while search was still lumbering along.)"

OK, so first of all the author is so ignorant about Vista as an OS and how it differs from XP that he reads something written about XP and then attempts to apply it to Vista. Mac zealots congenitally believe that "all Windows versions are the same." They have to believe this, because this falsehood is the foundation on which their entire pro-Mac, anti-Windows rationalized mindset rests. It is something that they *choose* to believe is true, even when much evidence proves otherwise.

So, in the title of this FUD disinformation piece, the author asserts that Vista is going to crash often enough to require certain "strategies" be employed to circumvent the results of those crashes. But only after a page of heavily biased, inaccurate and incomplete anti-Vista sentiment does he reveal that even when he tried what he *thought* would be a sure-fire way to *make* Vista crash by deliberately butchering his Vista system files, he was unable to make Vista crash.

Even so, after finally admitting his complete failure here to even theoretically justify the title of his article, he again cannot resist imparting a little ignorant FUD about Vista search--which he obviously doesn't know how to use. It's like, you know, come hell or high water he's going to say something negative about Vista even when he's forced to say something positive, kicking and screaming all the way.

******

Astute observers will note that I did not even scratch the surface of the FUD and falsehood contained in this article. They will also note that the FUD I've quoted here is contained on just *the first page and the top of the second page* of this 7-page FUD extravaganza.

To be truthful about it, these days Apple itself is far less of a FUD-Meister than the company used to be when it was known as "Apple Computer." But disinformation dies hard, unfortunately, and for Mac zealots steeped in Apple-Mac lore for decades, it is the only thing they know. Their entire frame of reference when it comes to computers is based on a flimsy edifice of inaccuracy and untruth.

It's exactly this kind of thing, so rampant in the MCBB (my own acronym for "Mac Community of the Brainwashed and Blind") for so many years that soured me on the Mac years ago. I hate to say it but the Mac community seems like a place where ignorance is cherished and is truly bliss. My hope is that one of these days people will realize that writing such FUD pieces, especially disguised as "information," does far more harm to Apple and to the "Mac community" than it will ever do to Microsoft. Such articles merely reinforce the already negative opinions professionals have about both parties.

My first thought was to post this to Information Week instead of here, but on reflection I did not want my email address associated with a site that would print such disinformation without batting an eye.

Erroneus · Jul 1, 2007, 01:02 PM

Nicely written there WaltC, quite a long post, but pretty good

Jun 30, 2007, 08:58 PM	#1
Iria DriverHeaven Extreme Member Join Date: Apr 2004 Posts: 7,275 Rep Power: 74	What To Do When Windows Vista Crashes: Little-Known Recovery Strategies Source: Information Week ________ I've finally got a compliment of technical substance to pay to Windows Vista, beyond the kudos it has justifiably received for the glitzy, Mac-like look and feel it has brought to the PC platform. The good news is that Vista, for all its annoyances--including slow search and intrusive security warnings--is much more robust and harder to break than any previous Microsoft operating system. Interestingly, even the infamous "blue screen of death" has largely been thrown onto the software slag heap. (Lock-ups during the installation process are now heralded with a blank black screen!) Unfortunately, crashes haven't been totally banished. More ominously, because Vista is packed with many more features and takes much longer to install than earlier OSes, when it does fail, you've got a time-consuming crisis on your hands.

Jul 1, 2007, 01:02 PM	#3
Erroneus Loving my Windows 7 Ent. Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Denmark Posts: 12,920 Rep Power: 77 System Specs	Nicely written there WaltC, quite a long post, but pretty good __________________

Jul 1, 2007, 11:19 AM	#2
WaltC DriverHeaven Addict Join Date: May 2003 Location: Deep in Martian soil where it's warm and the air is good Posts: 250 Rep Power: 0	At first I thought this might be an interesting article, but...yawn...it's just another Windows-disinformation piece written by an obvious Mac zealot who thinks he's "helping Apple" in some bizarre way by writing a lot of tripe about various versions of Windows. He thinks that because he disguises his disinformation as "information" that he's being clever. I feel sorry for the authors of such pieces whenever I have the misfortune of reading their work. It's sad to see anyone with such a narrow frame of experience that he feels compelled to defend it by the use of disinformation. Like other people in the world, my own computing experience is broad and multi-platform. As such, I worked with Macs in depth for a couple of years--and with Amigas for much longer than a couple of years--and with virtually everything ever made for x86 for much longer than even that. All these systems crashed at one time or another. That's why I can say with absolute authority that Macs crash. I recall them crashing fairly often, in fact. Does this mean that Macs are bad, or worse than any other system? Of course not. Every computer OS ever made will crash now and then. The idea , though, is to keep the frequency of that event as low as absolutely possible. So... Here are a few ways for a person to discern whether what he's reading is truly a technology article containing valuable information, or whether it's a propaganda piece written by well-meaning but nearly clueless platform zealots who wish to bash other platforms without appearing to bash them, if you know what I mean. Again, these folks must imagine they are being very sly and clever, but to me they just seem so transparent that their work sticks out like a sore thumb and is nigh indigestible. Clues to unmasking the clueless: 1) Often even the title of such pieces is revealing, especially when the title fixes a rare negative event in a context that implies that such an event is anything but rare, and is likely to be frequent, in fact. This article, for instance, is entitled: "What To Do When Windows Vista Crashes: Little-Known Recovery Strategies." The implication conveyed by the title is that Vista is going to crash often so you need to know about these "little known strategies" for your own protection. In fact, they aren't strategies at all, but rather utility programs which Microsoft includes in Vista Ultimate--and some of these are utilities that have a much wider purpose than being used only when "Vista crashes." Either the author doesn't know this, or care. If the intent of the article had been to convey information instead of disinformation, a far better title would have been: "Under the Hood of Vista Ultimate: Backup and Recovery Utilities." 2) When the title promises information about a particular technology, but the article itself veers into frequent comparative comments about another technology not mentioned in the title. In this case, the author pretends to be presenting information about Vista, but in the very first paragraph he starts talking about "the Mac." Indeed, he starts indirectly praising the Mac and bashing Vista in the very first sentence: "I've finally got a compliment of technical substance to pay to Windows Vista, beyond the kudos it has justifiably received for the glitzy, Mac-like look and feel it has brought to the PC platform." He "finally" has arrived at a "compliment" of "technical substance" for Microsoft's latest OS? Immediately, he is--subconsciously--declaring himself, isn't he? Of course, as is true of all Mac zealots, he is so steeped in the propaganda he's been reading for so long that he honestly believes that Apple invented the "glitzy GUI look and feel" and everybody else, including and especially Microsoft, of course, is guilty of copying it. He maintains this somewhat warped perspective even years after Apple dropped its "look and feel" lawsuit against Microsoft in recognition of the fact that Apple could not win it, and in recognition of Apple's dire need at the time for selling Microsoft the hundreds of millions of dollars of Apple stock that Microsoft purchased when Apple agreed to drop the suit. I mean, come on, even Steve Jobs himself has often been correctly quoted stating bluntly that the idea of the GUI he employed in the first Apple OS was not an original idea, but rather one that he borrowed from the Xerox Sparc. Make no mistake about it: such language in the very first sentence of the article declares that the author is far less interested in providing you with information about Vista than he is in trying to sell you a Mac. 3)When the article promising information on a certain technology actually attacks that technology, and attacks it in an extremely prejudicial manner. For instance: "The good news is that Vista, for all its annoyances--including slow search and intrusive security warnings--is much more robust and harder to break than any previous Microsoft operating system." I wonder if the author has ever heard of Vista's indexing feature, which is designed to provide extremely fast searches? As before, I do not think the author either knows or cares about searches in Vista at all, as he seems content with making yet another declarative statement which he completely fails to justify. Then there's a disparaging mention of "intrusive security warnings," which presumably concerns UAC, and by which the author demonstrates yet again that he's either ignorant of the UAC function or simply doesn't care about it. The fact is that a user can turn off the "intrusive security warnings" should he find them intrusive, and should he wish to lower his security threshold. But of course that's yet another fact you won't learn in this article, isn't it? Next: "Interestingly, even the infamous "blue screen of death" has largely been thrown onto the software slag heap. (Lock-ups during the installation process are now heralded with a blank black screen!)" OOoooh-h-h-h....a "blank black screen!" (exclamation point, no less!) You cannot find any more "retarded" criticism of Windows than the "blue screen of death" criticism, imo. I use the word "retarded" because to me that is just what this criticism is--it's so skewed, slanted, and just plain wrong that it is retarded. A point that I made earlier is that Macs crash, too. And depending on the application you run on your Mac, your frequency of crashing will vary. Notice how in all his glitzy Mac promotional comments the author never bothers to mention this fact--and that's because he wants you to infer that Macs just don't crash. It's a thoroughly dishonest characterization, and that's all it is. The "blue screen of death" in XP is an error message which attempts to simply explain to the user the origin of the offending software that caused the crash. It was "blue" simply to draw your attention. That is all it is and ever has been. Furthermore, an XP user can very easily set the OS so as not to display the "blue screen of death" but just to automatically reboot the system in the event of a crash, which is very similar to what happens when a Mac crashes. On the classical Macs I worked with for a couple of years, sometimes you'd get a very small error popup box that assigned the crash an error number but made no further attempt to identify it for you--you'd have to refer to a numbered "error index" outside of the computer to try and figure out what caused the crash--and then the machine rebooted after the crash. Sometimes, the Macs would just automatically reboot without even the very small popup box error number being displayed. Sometimes I'd have to manually reboot the Mac I was working with when it locked up. So, why is it that Mac zealots love to talk about the XP "blue screen of death" without seeming to have any idea of what it is or that it can be turned off or how it correlates to what happens on a Mac when a Mac crashes? Beats me, truly. The mindset behind it is so skewed that I have difficulty in conceiving how someone could claim to be a "professional" with such a warped and limited base of knowledge. The comment about the "blank black screen" is a red herring the author created just to yet again advance the concept he wants to impart--that Vista crashes constantly but Macs never do. It's just so sad to read this kind of thing. I've never seen the "blank black screen" the author exclaims about even once, and furthermore all Windows versions since XP are designed to automatically reboot during installation should the process hit a snag, and to try again should this unlikely event occur. It's never happened to me with Vista even once. How about this: "Unfortunately, crashes haven't been totally banished. More ominously, because Vista is packed with many more features and takes much longer to install than earlier OSes, when it does fail, you've got a time-consuming crisis on your hands." Yes, unfortunately "crashes haven't been totally banished" from any OS currently being sold, including OSX. That's because human programmers are imperfect, the hardware is imperfect, the drivers for the hardware are imperfect, the software we run is imperfect, and so we concentrate on making systems as stable as it is humanly possible to do. As such, crashes on any OS on any platform will never, ever be "totally banished." My opinion is that the author doesn't care about any of that--all he cares about is writing some FUD about Vista. My initial experience with Vista installation, and bear in mind that my first install was an upgrade install of Vista Ultimate right on top of my existing XP installation, took all of 25 minutes, and executed perfectly the very first time. I remember being surprised at how fast the upgrade install went, actually. It went roughly twice as fast as my WinXP upgrade installation went, as I recall. Again, we see the author making declarative negative statements about Vista which he refuses to justify. I'm convinced that he's not about to let facts get in the way of his Vista bashing spree, disguised as "information." Very sad. It's also interesting that although the author talks about what he thinks will happen should a Vista installation fail--a "time-consuming crisis"--I notice that he never states that his Vista installation ever failed at all. That's probably because it didn't fail, wouldn't you think? I think that's obvious. Only two more quotes to go: "The upshot is that standard Vista installations are less likely to fail to boot than were standalone Windows 95/98/XP setups. Paradoxically, dual-boot configurations seem more prone to problems, but that'll be the subject of a second article." First, notice how the author lumps "95/98/XP" together as if they all are the same OS and as if they all had the identical "problem" he talks about here? The fact is that XP was an order of magnitude better at avoiding a problem boot than was 95/98--for lots and lots of reasons I don't care to delve into here. The author yet again chooses ignorance over knowledge, but that's his problem--not mine... Another factoid: since day one I've been running a dual-boot configuration of Vista32 and Vista 64, and I've never had the first problem booting to the partition of my choice--not even once. 4) You can spot a FUD piece a mile away when the assertion made in the title is refuted by the author's text inside the article itself. "Vista also is more resistant to damage to key files. Indeed, my original plan was to retrace Langa's XP path for my Vista article and induce a crash by damaging the crucial "hal.dll" file. Thanks to Vista's improved protections, even though I had admin privileges, I couldn't touch it. (On the other hand, my hal.dll test exposed the achingly slow way search runs in Vista. I found the hal.dll file manually by going to directly C:/Windows/System32, while search was still lumbering along.)" OK, so first of all the author is so ignorant about Vista as an OS and how it differs from XP that he reads something written about XP and then attempts to apply it to Vista. Mac zealots congenitally believe that "all Windows versions are the same." They have to believe this, because this falsehood is the foundation on which their entire pro-Mac, anti-Windows rationalized mindset rests. It is something that they choose to believe is true, even when much evidence proves otherwise. So, in the title of this FUD disinformation piece, the author asserts that Vista is going to crash often enough to require certain "strategies" be employed to circumvent the results of those crashes. But only after a page of heavily biased, inaccurate and incomplete anti-Vista sentiment does he reveal that even when he tried what he thought would be a sure-fire way to make Vista crash by deliberately butchering his Vista system files, he was unable to make Vista crash. Even so, after finally admitting his complete failure here to even theoretically justify the title of his article, he again cannot resist imparting a little ignorant FUD about Vista search--which he obviously doesn't know how to use. It's like, you know, come hell or high water he's going to say something negative about Vista even when he's forced to say something positive, kicking and screaming all the way. ****** Astute observers will note that I did not even scratch the surface of the FUD and falsehood contained in this article. They will also note that the FUD I've quoted here is contained on just the first page and the top of the second page of this 7-page FUD extravaganza. To be truthful about it, these days Apple itself is far less of a FUD-Meister than the company used to be when it was known as "Apple Computer." But disinformation dies hard, unfortunately, and for Mac zealots steeped in Apple-Mac lore for decades, it is the only thing they know. Their entire frame of reference when it comes to computers is based on a flimsy edifice of inaccuracy and untruth. It's exactly this kind of thing, so rampant in the MCBB (my own acronym for "Mac Community of the Brainwashed and Blind") for so many years that soured me on the Mac years ago. I hate to say it but the Mac community seems like a place where ignorance is cherished and is truly bliss. My hope is that one of these days people will realize that writing such FUD pieces, especially disguised as "information," does far more harm to Apple and to the "Mac community" than it will ever do to Microsoft. Such articles merely reinforce the already negative opinions professionals have about both parties. My first thought was to post this to Information Week instead of here, but on reflection I did not want my email address associated with a site that would print such disinformation without batting an eye.