[CS-FSLUG] Window washing

[N. Thompson]

>From my blog:
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I have no idea why but for half of the last week Windows has been crashing incessantly, my longest uptime while actually using Windows was 5 minutes at best and frequently it had locked up before even getting to the login screen. Normally that wouldn't be too unusual for older versions of Windows but Windows XP is supposed to be much more stable and was living up to that claim until this happened

There is absolutely no possible explanation for what happened to Windows, I ran a virus scan, checked for critical updates and ran Spybot S&D as well as chkdsk and the disk defragmenter, finally having run out of options I completely reinstalled it and the same thing happened again. After reinstalling it I tried downgrading from the Java 2 SDK 1.4.2_05 that I had just installed to the 1.4.2_04 version that worked fine before, I also downgraded FireFox from 0.9 to 0.8 because the crashes usually happened at the same time as Azureus or FireFox were doing something. The issue however was very likely *not* related to Azureus because other Bittorrent clients also caused Windows to crash.

After reinstalling Windows XP a second time it had stopped crashing insanely like before but I've also kept the software down to the very minimum possible (bare bones installation with FireFox and QCD, no Java and very few software developer tools) because I'm concerned that it will start acting up again.

Its ironic that I have to _rely_ on such an _unreliable_ operating system until I find a Linux distribution I can finally be pleased with.