Jim O’Halloran’s Weblog

Published April 22nd, 2003 by Jim O'Halloran

More on Windows Rot

A tester working for Microsot picked up on Scotts rant (which I linked and responded to in my last entry. If I was trying to explain WinRot to a tester who was going to try and reproduce it, this is the best that I can do…

Bruce…

The problem with WinRot is that its a process that just seems to “happen” over a period of time. There’s no warning, no messages in the event log, no “Windows would like to rot now. Is this ok? Yes/No” dialog. Nothing. Today, its ok, in a months time my PC will use a lot more RAM to do exactly the same things, and in six months time it will use much more again. Eventually the machine just starts crashing randomly (usually Apps GPF, not full Windows BSOD’s), or some features just stop working, the thing starts behaving strangely, or going unresponsive at inconvenient times. Eventually this random behaviour drives you fscking nuts and you have to rebuild. Now I’m a programmer, I know things don’t “just happen”, but there doesn’t seem to be a specific event that causes it, the only constant is a long period of heavy use. The more installation/uninstallation of software you do, the less time it takes before the rot sets in.

Perhaps insted of agressively “dogfooding” every new beta of each successive OS internally Microsoft should run some machines to death in normal use then have the developers tear the OS apart bit by bit once it has gone rotten. Its real, and its getting worse, its been there ever since the registry was introduced in a big way in Win95. If I was a betting man, I’d be putting money on WinRot being some form of insidious registry corruption.

Of course, if the registry was a text file, I could keep it under source control and verify that for you, but I can’t, so I can’t.

Not much is it… Anyone want to add anything to what I’ve seen?

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