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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: QwikSand who wrote (27670)	2/12/2000 11:36:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

QS - great post and completely accurate - with one correction. The issue of driver incompatibility, which was at the root of more than 80% of the BSOD events on MS servers (they instrumented and monitored a majority of their many thousands of internally used NT servers to gather the data) meant that driver issues were one of the first concerns addressed. That resulted in the requirement for "driver signing" - while the system will allow you to load and run an unsigned driver (i.e. one which has not gone through the MS driver certification test suite). it will bitch at you on a fairly regular basis until you get a signed version... I would expect that initially, a lot of hardware, especially older hardware, will not be supported with signed drivers. Driver signing does not solve the problem, but it is a start - one can assume a system developed with all signed components will be significantly more reliable than one with unsigned components. People in corporations who get a pre-loaded W2K Dell box and then never do anything but plug in a network cable may be OK. Many others will feel pain for a year or two. I think that is exactly right - new Win2K certified hardware will probably be fine, while older stuff will have varying degrees of user satisfaction. None the less, I loaded Win2K onto a 2 year old DEC HiNote 2000 laptop which has a high number of integrated and somewhat offbeat devices - built-in 10/100 ethernet and 56K modem to name a few - and it loaded and ran fine - except for some of the power management, as that machine was pre-ACPI... so far (about 3 months of daily use) it has been completely reliable. That machine originally shipped with Win95, which blew up about once a day. Also, the next worst offender in the BSOD race was replacement of system DLLs with "modified" DLLs provided by an IHV - that has also been eliminated, and now the system DLL is protected, while the "custom" version gets executed only by the hardware which loads it. Clumsy but it still allows hardware vendors to attempt their own optimization without compromising the OS, at least for signed components, and only blows out the offending DLL if an unsigned version is loaded, since everything else executes the system version, not the modified one.