Critical Randall C. Kennedy risks derailing Windows 7 launch
A supposed product bug has old fears surfacing. Is it a bug, a feature, or tabloid journalism?
Follow @JPBruzzeseWindows 7 has a problem! No, not the bug supposedly being reported on by what I like to call headline-seeking tabloid journalists. The problem is that Windows 7 is coming on the heels of Windows Vista, possibly one of the most maligned OSes to date. It must perform perfectly or it will be crushed by the Windows haters and labeled a repeat performance with headlines like "Microsoft up to its old tricks again." Ugggh!
Let's start at the beginning, for those of you who do not read my esteemed colleague Randall C. Kennedy's column. He claimed that an "apparent fatal flaw in the NTFS driver stack" may be the cause of a bug, a "massive memory leak" that occurred when the chkdsk.exe utility was run under certain circumstances. He noted that others reported getting the Blue Screen of Death as Windows ran out of physical memory. Although Kennedy noted he did not get BSODs using several test configurations, he had no problem trusting external sources for that juicy tidbit.
[ Read for yourself: Randall C. Kennedy's test results of Windows 7's CHKDSK routine. ]
To start with, let's track back the sources. Kennedy says it was "according to various Web sources"; one of those sources was named by John Fontana of Network World as a blog called Chris123NT that gave credit back to another blog by Ryan Price. Ryan provided the recipe for re-creating the problem. In the issue of fairness, and to give my readers a chance to duplicate it, here are the steps:
