Tuesday 18 February 2014

I got Windows 8.1 to bluescreen

I've had my laptop with Windows 8 (later upgraded to 8.1 with the first release of updates) for a few years now. I don't understand all the anti-Microsoft hate. True, they seem to be following the good-rubbish pattern of old (XP good, Vista rubbish, Windows 7 good, Windows 8 a bit rubbish) but it's not as bad an operating system as the nay-sayers and Linux-lovers would have us believe.

In fact, in two years of owning it, I've never crashed Windows 8. And I do some pretty weird low-level coding, messing about with intercepting Windows messages and sub-classing. Well, it's pretty low-level to me, someone brought up with VB6 and Visual Studio!

The tired old joke about having to reboot every half-day is as irrelevant as it is dated. I never shut the thing down. At the end of the day, simply fold the lid down and the next morning, open it up and start coding again. I can literally go for weeks without rebooting (even when it moans about updates being ready, I usually put them off until I absolutely have to install them).

So it was quite a surprise today, that I had my first Windows 8 BSOD.


It's a much nice shade of blue this time around, but it's still as annoying as days of old - crapping out just as you're about to hit the S-key in a Ctrl+S combination.

From nearly two years without a crash, I've had about three today - ever since I rebooted last night and the latest Windows update was installed. Maybe that's just a coincidence. But it happens every now and again, when I try to burn some code onto an Arduino.

Maybe it's the FTDI driver. Maybe it's Java or Processing (or whatever the Arduino IDE is coded in). Maybe it's the latest Windows update. Maybe it's always been like this and I've just never programmed an Arduino often enough between reboots to have this problems surface before.

But it's getting bloody annoying (not enough to even consider moved to Linux, but annoying all the same!)

No comments:

Post a Comment