Windows Desktop Search and the Blue Screen of Death, kinda sorta related | The Coffeehouse

Massif
aim stupidly high, expect to fail often.

In that, when I have WDS installed I get frequent Blue screens, and when I don't I get fewer blue screens.

The root cause seems to be either an encrypted file system called Pointsec, or the fact this Dell Laptop they gave me at work is a pile of pants.

(This image represents a dell Latitude D620)

Anyway, it would appear that WDS pushes my laptop over the edge of unreliability, and I was wondering whether anyone else had experienced software pushing their system a tad too far. This is irritating because it means I can't use WDS on this machine, and have to find things... shock horror... by hand. (metaphorically)

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

Massif wrote:
In that, when I have WDS installed I get frequent Blue screens, and when I don't I get fewer blue screens.

The root cause seems to be either an encrypted file system called Pointsec, or the fact this Dell Laptop they gave me at work is a pile of pants. (metaphorically)

It's Pointsec. Pointsec SUCKS. First thing I did in my work dell was to uninstall that, it screws around the file system something awful.

Massif
aim stupidly high, expect to fail often.

I'd love to uninstall it, but I fear the corporate drones coming round and trying to have me killed.

I'm right next to the sixth floor window, it wouldn't take much and there'd be one fewer contractor in the building.

Yggdrasil
Pour me a cab, 'cause I can't drink no more.

Massif wrote:

(This image represents a dell Latitude D620)

I had a D620 for a couple of months at my last job and loved it - it worked fine, smoothly and with no errors, given that the first thing I did was uninstall all the preinstalled security software sending hooks and tendrils deep into the OS and making it massively unstable.

It wasn't deployed by our corporate IT, but preinstalled by Dell. We really had no use for it. It had to go and go it did, though it really resisted - seems that it's WAAY too important to be uninstalled by a simple Add/Remove Programs wizard, isn't it?

Massif
aim stupidly high, expect to fail often.

Then I shall happily blame pointsec for the fact that not only does the machine crash often, but takes 10 minutes to load Visual Studio, and a further 10 minutes to open our (admittedly stupidly large) project.

Grrr...

Now, if only they'd let me not use it.

That being said, yesterdays BSOD was the spectacular, and worrying "Hardware Failure, your memory's busted" message. Which made a change from the normal Blue Screen.

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

Massif wrote:
That being said, yesterdays BSOD was the spectacular, and worrying "Hardware Failure, your memory's busted" message. Which made a change from the normal Blue Screen.

Has anyone ever tried a Pokémon-like game for BSODs, where the objective is to try to make your computer generate every type of BSOD?

...the winners gets cash to compensate for the hardware they destroyed in the process.

AndyC

W3bbo wrote:

Has anyone ever tried a Pokémon-like game for BSODs, where the objective is to try to make your computer generate every type of BSOD?

Given that you can generate any BSOD by calling KeBugCheckEx, what would be the point?

Massif
aim stupidly high, expect to fail often.

I'm not sure the hardware failure message was a bug check. But I'm sure there'd be an API for it somewhere.

ivan_

Before I put SP1 on my Vista I was getting blue screens very often.

After putting SP1, it seems that blue screens are not a problem now, but SP1 still has many bugs and unstable. Sad

If there is a scratch on a DVD and you are watching something in Windows Media Center, good luck closing it normally when that scratch is reached. WMC hangs Sad . Even when I select to skip frames when errors are on the disc, it doesn't skip those frames, but tries to read them indefinetely, and with full screen open, it becomes a real pain to close windows media center Sad .
So bugs like this are all over Vista, many of my friends are switching back to XP, since Vista hurts their productivity a lot.

One of the funniest bugs in Vista that I found was that Zone Alarm was posting question messages under a different user's account, and I could not figure out for a while what is going on, until I switched to a different user and saw all the messages. Some other apps do the same. Never had this problem in XP.

Massif
aim stupidly high, expect to fail often.

ivan_ wrote:

Before I put SP1 on my Vista I was getting blue screens very often.

After putting SP1, it seems that blue screens are not a problem now, but SP1 still has many bugs and unstable.

If there is a scratch on a DVD and you are watching something in Windows Media Center, good luck closing it normally when that scratch is reached. WMC hangs . Even when I select to skip frames when errors are on the disc, it doesn't skip those frames, but tries to read them indefinetely, and with full screen open, it becomes a real pain to close windows media center .
So bugs like this are all over Vista, many of my friends are switching back to XP, since Vista hurts their productivity a lot.

One of the funniest bugs in Vista that I found was that Zone Alarm was posting question messages under a different user's account, and I could not figure out for a while what is going on, until I switched to a different user and saw all the messages. Some other apps do the same. Never had this problem in XP.

That's awesome, except I get no problems at all from either of my Vista machines, and I get these blue screens from an XP machine at work. Expressionless