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Microsoft code taking the blame
By Gearhead, NetworkWorld.com, 04/14/05
Here's an interesting quote from an item in Raymond Chen's blog (Raymond is a Microsoft QA veteran):
"A bunch of us were going through some Windows crashes that people sent in by clicking the "Send Error Report" button in the crash dialog ... when we looked at the error report, the ecx and eax registers were equal! There were other crashes of a similar nature, where the CPU simply lots its marbles and did something 'impossible'."
Turns out this impossible thing wasn't -- it was a problem caused by overclocking which, it turns out, is not as rare a PC tweak as we might all assume ...
Apparently Chen and company contacted 10 users who had allowed their faults of this type to be submitted and found that 5 knew they were overclocking while 5 didn't. Apparently a significant number of PCs often from local computer stores are built and shipped overclocked!
Chen's blog item concluded with:
"I wonder if it'd be possible to detect overclocking from software and put up a warning in the crash dialog, 'It appears that your computer is overclocked. This may cause random crashes. Try running the CPU at its rated speed to improve stability.' But it takes only one false positive to get people saying, 'Oh, there goes Microsoft blaming other people for its buggy software again.'"
Interesting defense. While Chen has a good point about Microsoft taking the blame unfairly over this and perhaps similar issues its not like Microsoft is renown for their code quality. Indeed, check out an item in J.B. Surveyer's Keep an Open Eye blog from September 2004 which details how Chen's team added code to allow Windows to work around a bug in Sim City!
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