[GRLUG] grlug Digest, Vol 41, Issue 2

[Michael Mol]

On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 4:46 PM, <peyeps at iserv.net> wrote:
> "Starting with XP I think most of the Windows workstation stability issues
> were resolved,..."
>
> Well my XP partition with service pack two will occasionaly come up with a
> black screen of death.  No response to keyboard, or mouse.

I've never seen anything like that that wasn't hardware related.

>   I think there
> is something that I won't let talk to the network in the background
> someplace that grabs control and won't let go until it can phone home.

If it's in the background, and it's in userspace (and virtually
everything in Windows is) it can't easily do something like that.
That'd be ridiculously stupid behavior for any sort of monitoring
software, anyway; There's no point for such software to draw attention
to itself.

> Haven't been able to identify it.  Happens three or four times a month, or
> can go for months without showing up.  Virus and spyware scans come up
> clean, so I'm assuming it is a "legitimate" program's attempts to get on
> the internet.

What do you mean by blocking network access to it?

>  Possibly Dr Watson, even though I have error reporting
> turned off.  No three finger salute will clear it up.   Hard power off is
> the only answer.

Dr Watson won't phone home unless you tell it to.  Seriously.  The
worst thing it might do (I don't think it does, but I suppose it's
possible) is try to connect to a symbol server to get debugging
symbols in the event of a crash.  I don't think it does that, though;
Normally, it makes a minidump (WITHOUT heap), and sends that along
with some configuration information if you tell it to.

>
> Never happens in my Ubuntu.
>
> This is just my personal experience with MS stability.

I suspect you've got a buggy hardware driver, particularly if sleep
states might be involved.  You say you're running SP2, which tells me
you're not keeping patched.  That's your choice, but you're *going* to
see problems that way, and not necessarily out of anyone's malice.

At the very least, grab the latest drivers from the manufacturer's
websites.  You don't need to run Windows Update to do that.

-- 
:wq