[GRLUG] Windows XP buggy driver or hardware problem.

[peyeps at iserv.net]

>> 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.
>
> What do you mean by blocking network access to it?
>

Microsoft Windows, in my experience, expects to have network resources
available to it, and applications using Windows follow the same pattern.

I am running Jetico Firewall, which pops up any time:

One application invokes another.

An application wants access to the network.

Any time it visits a new IP address.

The first time an application wants access to the network, I can grant
access, but then after that, it will pop up if that application wants
access to a particular IP adddress.

I can give it one time access or tell it to remember.

There are a number of applications, ie Notebook, that expects access to
the network, but since I am not using it to edit or read documents on
anything but stuff that is on the local hard drive, network access is not
needed.  So I told the firewall to block access for that application.

But there are some things that seem to get pouty if they don't have access
to the network, and refuse to respond.

>I suspect you've got a buggy hardware driver, particularly if sleep
> states might be involved.

I don't think sleep states are involved because I've had it happen to me
when I open an application or go to save data to a file.

Possible buggy hardware driver, but if I'm not changing the OS, the
hardware driver shouldn't be broken.  I will grant you that hardware can
break, but software doesn't break.  If you have enough pieces and
combinations, eventually something will mis-match.   Just exactly how many
problems will I introduce if I go and update all my hardware drivers?  
Or, if I only have one driver that is bad, which one should I update?  I
could update the video driver, but is the risk worth the reward?

What steers me away from the hardware is that there seems to be no problem
with my Ubuntu, though I suppose the windows install that came with the
system might be making use of something Ubuntu is not using.

So should I spend time and effort troubleshooting an very erratic problem
or simply reboot into a different partition.  (I will grant you that there
is a hard drive partition I don't write to with Ubuntu, so it is
conceivable that there are some bad disk segments on my NTFS partition.)