4 ms·

> Linux: 0 MacOS X: 1 Windows: Lost count a long time ago. Had to do it twice with Windows 10 in the last year. When I was first reading your comment I assumed

> Linux: 0 MacOS X: 1 Windows: Lost count a long time ago. Had to do it twice with Windows 10 in the last year. When I was first reading your comment I assumed it was experience in the distant past. The different experiences people have with the same software is incredible to me. I have owned four Windows computers, up to present day, and maintained those of family and some friends, and not once have I had to reinstall Windows since the days of Windows 2000, excepting harddrive failures. I always wonder what makes the difference. But I guess if I knew, Microsoft would know (being staffed by people smarter and more informed than me), and hopefully fix whatever causes the problems necessitating reinstall. It's like all the complaints about Firefox's memory usage - people have complained about it for years, it's clearly a real problem for some? many? users, but I have never seen it on any platform.

Scramblejams 9y ago
I don't think it's really fixable. As I mentioned, Windows has gotten too complex, and one of the reasons why is that there is too much legacy cruft. Some bug in a random piece of software flipped a bit somewhere in the registry that upsets another piece of software? Good luck ever finding that. And is the registry ever going to go away? Nope. Not unless MS decides to break with backwards compatibility on an apocalyptic scale. To give you a real life example, just last week I was trying to get my Win10 laptop to do local DNS lookups successfully. (I run dnsmasq on my home LAN, and I have it resolve names like "router" or "server" or whatever.) Not a problem on Linux or MacOS, but on Windows it's often a problem. Why? I don't know. There are all kinds of different ways Windows looks up names -- NetBIOS, WINS, DNS, etc., and they interact unpredictably from where I sit. I'm not the only one with this problem so I found a lot of blog and Stackoverflow posts with various fixes. I applied one of them by adding "." to the end of all local lookups. Seemed to work just fine. Two nights ago it stopped working. Then I rebooted. That made it work again. Last night it stopped working. I rebooted. Nope. Local DNS is no more. Why? I have no clue. So I'll just go try some other random fix to see if it works. This process of applying random fixes should seem familiar to anybody who troubleshoots black boxes. I really don't want my OS to be this much of a black box.
- blacksmith_tb 9y ago
  Hmm, doesn't that sound like a job for the hosts file (on any of the OSes)? Unless 'server' and 'router' don't have fixed IPs somehow?
  - Scramblejams 9y ago
    No. Then every time I make a change in my network (not just changing IPs, but when I add a machine), I would have to modify a bunch of host files on all my different machines. No, this is actually what DNS is made for. As I said, Linux and MacOS are fine with it. It's Windows that's causing a problem.

Scramblejams 9y ago

I don't think it's really fixable. As I mentioned, Windows has gotten too complex, and one of the reasons why is that there is too much legacy cruft. Some bug in a random piece of software flipped a bit somewhere in the registry that upsets another piece of software? Good luck ever finding that. And is the registry ever going to go away? Nope. Not unless MS decides to break with backwards compatibility on an apocalyptic scale. To give you a real life example, just last week I was trying to get my Win10 laptop to do local DNS lookups successfully. (I run dnsmasq on my home LAN, and I have it resolve names like "router" or "server" or whatever.) Not a problem on Linux or MacOS, but on Windows it's often a problem. Why? I don't know. There are all kinds of different ways Windows looks up names -- NetBIOS, WINS, DNS, etc., and they interact unpredictably from where I sit. I'm not the only one with this problem so I found a lot of blog and Stackoverflow posts with various fixes. I applied one of them by adding "." to the end of all local lookups. Seemed to work just fine. Two nights ago it stopped working. Then I rebooted. That made it work again. Last night it stopped working. I rebooted. Nope. Local DNS is no more. Why? I have no clue. So I'll just go try some other random fix to see if it works. This process of applying random fixes should seem familiar to anybody who troubleshoots black boxes. I really don't want my OS to be this much of a black box.

blacksmith_tb 9y ago
Hmm, doesn't that sound like a job for the hosts file (on any of the OSes)? Unless 'server' and 'router' don't have fixed IPs somehow?
- Scramblejams 9y ago
  No. Then every time I make a change in my network (not just changing IPs, but when I add a machine), I would have to modify a bunch of host files on all my different machines. No, this is actually what DNS is made for. As I said, Linux and MacOS are fine with it. It's Windows that's causing a problem.