5 ms·

There's a lot of crazy that goes on in a desktop OS that must be cruft left over from legacy. I use windows all the time. If you put a bad CD in it you can loc

There's a lot of crazy that goes on in a desktop OS that must be cruft left over from legacy. I use windows all the time. If you put a bad CD in it you can lock the whole window manager up while it's thrashing the CD to be head or tales of it. Sometimes crash it. As soon as you hit the hardware eject it will free back up. Reading a CD shouldn't do that. There was the post on HN some months back about the tickrate in windows being set by random applications super low and not being put back up so it uses lots of extra power for no reason. I just wanted to say the hand wavy "Yeah but X does a lot more Y" as some kind of excuse is all too common.

ksk 13y ago
>There's a lot of crazy that goes on in a desktop OS that must be cruft left over from legacy. I agree with you but it depends on what you mean by cruft. There aren't really any windows features that actively consume (noticeable) resources and are not useful to someone. Designing feature rich software for a billion different usecases is quite hard. Its reasonably easy to make one-off products that just do one thing well. > If you put a bad CD in it you can lock the whole window manager up while it's thrashing the CD to be head or tales of it. Sometimes crash it. As soon as you hit the hardware eject it will free back up. Wow.. are you running Windows 95 ? :) The CD thing was common back then. The only reason this can happen on NT is because of some really buggy driver/hardware combination but even that is highly unlikely. Whats far more likely is you have some kind of buggy explorer plugin that is attempting to generate helpful thumbnails or something while enumerating an unreadable medium. AFAIK Explorer is still single-threaded for the most part for backwards compatibility - which worsens the impact. (Unfortunately a lot of this crap is preinstalled by the OEM) IMO Microsoft made an enormous mistake by allowing third parties to extend their OS in ways that can seriously impact user experience like that. Learn from Apple, MS ! >There was the post on HN some months back about the tickrate in windows being set by random applications super low and not being put back up so it uses lots of extra power for no reason. Are you talking about timer coalescing? I believe you cant change that setting without a reboot. Or perhaps you mean something else.
- hrkristian 13y ago
  The CD thing was really common for me back in the XP era, which also happened to be the plethora of messed up CDs era. It usually wasn't an OS level event, though, merely explorer.exe, so killing it sufficed if ejecting didn't. (Note: This was when ctrl-alt-del opened task manager directly, so you didn't have to right-click the explorer.exe managed task-bar, which would hang if you did)
  - ksk 13y ago
    Hmm, I don't particularly remember any CD ever crashing explorer, but I was and am very conscious of running a as-vanilla-as-possible install of windows when it comes to drivers, services and explorer plugins/BHOs/Shell Extensions/etc.
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  Windows Explorer reached its pinnacle in Windows XP when in classic mode and went downhill after that with the crippled search facility (showing two items for each search on Vista - one on the disk and one from the search index it generates painfully slowly), the tabbing to the listview headers (why would you want to tab to a header?), the auto viewing of folders (this MUST be a music directory as it has 1 MP3 file in it so I will show a rating system for ALL files), the giant blue bar that sits at the bottom telling you that you are using a computer with a processor in it (duplicating the System Information window accessible from Windows-Break), the giant useless ribbon on Windows 8, the non-following treeview on the left so that the right and left pane do not correlate to each other (made an option in 7 I think), the top organize bar on 7+ that is not usable using the keyboard, the daft favourite links area that by default occupies 40% of the space on the left, and the flicker-full navigation bar. And another thing: the "uninstall a program" from that silly bar on the top. Explorer is for exploring files and directories, surely not to do EVERYTHING with your computer...? Don't get me started on Finder on the Mac.
  - ksk 13y ago
    I always thought the search functionality of windows was horrible till Windows 7 finally managed to deliver a decent implementation of it. >And another thing: the "uninstall a program" from that silly bar on the top. Explorer is for exploring files and directories, surely not to do EVERYTHING with your computer...? Well, for about 20 odd years explorer.exe is technically just a 'shell namespace browser' and one of those shell namespaces is the 'explore files and directory' part and the others are the control panel part , uninstall programs part, etc I believe for windows 95 microsoft originally did not plan to allow third parties to extend the shell namespace because they felt a buggy shell extension could crash the entire OS - which was true for W95. There is an option now to launch these in seperate processes.
userbinator 13y ago
> If you put a bad CD in it you can lock the whole window manager up That's because the retry behaviour is quite aggressive - it will keep trying many times, waiting on the driver, until either a read error is returned or a timeout happens (which is somewhere in the region of minutes). The same thing happens with a hard drive that's dying, a slow USB drive, or anything else that takes a long time --- I'm guessing that this long wait is still better than frequent "An error occurred reading/writing. [Cancel] [Retry]" popups.
jsight 13y ago
> If you put a bad CD in it you can lock the whole window manager up while it's thrashing the CD to be head or tales of it. Sometimes crash it. I remember visiting a relative's house a few years ago and noticing that they were very fastidious about removing a game CD from the drive when they weren't using it to improve performance. I thought it was a bit silly, as surely no OS would slow down dramatically just because a CD was in the drive. Of course, this was because I had been using Linux pretty much exclusively for quite a while. The Windows machine (running 7, if I recall) actually was really slow to open file dialogs and other basic things as long as the disc was in the drive. There was nothing wrong with the disc, its just that lots of things synchronously accessed it and weird times. I made me realize just how much less unpleasant OSes had become since I left that platform.

ksk 13y ago

>There's a lot of crazy that goes on in a desktop OS that must be cruft left over from legacy. I agree with you but it depends on what you mean by cruft. There aren't really any windows features that actively consume (noticeable) resources and are not useful to someone. Designing feature rich software for a billion different usecases is quite hard. Its reasonably easy to make one-off products that just do one thing well. > If you put a bad CD in it you can lock the whole window manager up while it's thrashing the CD to be head or tales of it. Sometimes crash it. As soon as you hit the hardware eject it will free back up. Wow.. are you running Windows 95 ? :) The CD thing was common back then. The only reason this can happen on NT is because of some really buggy driver/hardware combination but even that is highly unlikely. Whats far more likely is you have some kind of buggy explorer plugin that is attempting to generate helpful thumbnails or something while enumerating an unreadable medium. AFAIK Explorer is still single-threaded for the most part for backwards compatibility - which worsens the impact. (Unfortunately a lot of this crap is preinstalled by the OEM) IMO Microsoft made an enormous mistake by allowing third parties to extend their OS in ways that can seriously impact user experience like that. Learn from Apple, MS ! >There was the post on HN some months back about the tickrate in windows being set by random applications super low and not being put back up so it uses lots of extra power for no reason. Are you talking about timer coalescing? I believe you cant change that setting without a reboot. Or perhaps you mean something else.

hrkristian 13y ago
The CD thing was really common for me back in the XP era, which also happened to be the plethora of messed up CDs era. It usually wasn't an OS level event, though, merely explorer.exe, so killing it sufficed if ejecting didn't. (Note: This was when ctrl-alt-del opened task manager directly, so you didn't have to right-click the explorer.exe managed task-bar, which would hang if you did)
- ksk 13y ago
  Hmm, I don't particularly remember any CD ever crashing explorer, but I was and am very conscious of running a as-vanilla-as-possible install of windows when it comes to drivers, services and explorer plugins/BHOs/Shell Extensions/etc.
72deluxe 13y ago
Windows Explorer reached its pinnacle in Windows XP when in classic mode and went downhill after that with the crippled search facility (showing two items for each search on Vista - one on the disk and one from the search index it generates painfully slowly), the tabbing to the listview headers (why would you want to tab to a header?), the auto viewing of folders (this MUST be a music directory as it has 1 MP3 file in it so I will show a rating system for ALL files), the giant blue bar that sits at the bottom telling you that you are using a computer with a processor in it (duplicating the System Information window accessible from Windows-Break), the giant useless ribbon on Windows 8, the non-following treeview on the left so that the right and left pane do not correlate to each other (made an option in 7 I think), the top organize bar on 7+ that is not usable using the keyboard, the daft favourite links area that by default occupies 40% of the space on the left, and the flicker-full navigation bar. And another thing: the "uninstall a program" from that silly bar on the top. Explorer is for exploring files and directories, surely not to do EVERYTHING with your computer...? Don't get me started on Finder on the Mac.
- ksk 13y ago
  I always thought the search functionality of windows was horrible till Windows 7 finally managed to deliver a decent implementation of it. >And another thing: the "uninstall a program" from that silly bar on the top. Explorer is for exploring files and directories, surely not to do EVERYTHING with your computer...? Well, for about 20 odd years explorer.exe is technically just a 'shell namespace browser' and one of those shell namespaces is the 'explore files and directory' part and the others are the control panel part , uninstall programs part, etc I believe for windows 95 microsoft originally did not plan to allow third parties to extend the shell namespace because they felt a buggy shell extension could crash the entire OS - which was true for W95. There is an option now to launch these in seperate processes.

userbinator 13y ago

> If you put a bad CD in it you can lock the whole window manager up That's because the retry behaviour is quite aggressive - it will keep trying many times, waiting on the driver, until either a read error is returned or a timeout happens (which is somewhere in the region of minutes). The same thing happens with a hard drive that's dying, a slow USB drive, or anything else that takes a long time --- I'm guessing that this long wait is still better than frequent "An error occurred reading/writing. [Cancel] [Retry]" popups.

jsight 13y ago

> If you put a bad CD in it you can lock the whole window manager up while it's thrashing the CD to be head or tales of it. Sometimes crash it. I remember visiting a relative's house a few years ago and noticing that they were very fastidious about removing a game CD from the drive when they weren't using it to improve performance. I thought it was a bit silly, as surely no OS would slow down dramatically just because a CD was in the drive. Of course, this was because I had been using Linux pretty much exclusively for quite a while. The Windows machine (running 7, if I recall) actually was really slow to open file dialogs and other basic things as long as the disc was in the drive. There was nothing wrong with the disc, its just that lots of things synchronously accessed it and weird times. I made me realize just how much less unpleasant OSes had become since I left that platform.