Re: Re Keystrokes: Possible BIOS compatibility

[J R FOX jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

--- "Patricia M. Godfrey"  wrote:

> J. R. Fox wrote:

> > A "real", contemporary, and reasonably capable
> OS -- and I'm afraid
> this would have to include W2K or XP -- should
> provide major resistance
> to a crashing program being able to bring down the
> whole works. Such
> cases should be very few and far between.>

> but if an aberrent app overwites certain addressess
> in RAM, nothing will
> prevent a reboot. Nothing SHOULD write to those
> addressess,

> but in the late DOS era they were frequently  >
unused, and a lot of apps sneaked in
> there to get a few extra K.


Patricia,

I could certainly be wrong about this, but I think the
reasonably contemporary, multitasking, 32-bit
operating systems (OS/2, eCS, W2K or XP -- I don't
know much about Linux, but I'm guessing it probably
fits on this list) take *active measures* to preclude
an app being able to do this. That's part of the
point of their design. In fact, I don't recall seeing
*any* app crash Win after the NT-4 days. The app
crashes, yes -- often with that "writing a debugging
report" to Dr. Watson message. You don't even have
the Dr. Watson system in W98, I believe. (Not that
the pages worth of gobbledygook it generates would be
of much use to anyone besides a systems analyst or
applications programmer well versed in Windoze.)

But the OS itself does not come down, in the BSOD
sense. About the worst I have seen (and very rarely)
is that Task Manager gets frozen dead, which is
perhaps Redmund's way of telling you that your wisest
move NOW is to hit the Reset switch, and hope for the
best. (A Win consultant has since turned me on to a
Task Manager on Steroids alternative, which _might_
give you back control of the wheel, and is certainly
useful in other circumstances.) You can't really
compare W98 to this.

In 10 years of running OS/2 and then eCS, the only
thing I can recall crashing the OS itself was a video
driver that had some fatal issue with my particular
hardware, *if* I happened to trip a certain trapdoor.
That got real ugly, fast -- the screen dissolving into
a blinking checkerboard of colored squares, and it was
definitely Reset time. But the video driver must have
"Ring 0" level privileges, and I don't think any app
gets to venture near those lofty heights. Once I
changed to a different version of the video driver,
the problem never recurred.


Jordan