This is a pretty uninformative article. It doesn't actually say why Windows would crash, as the title promises. It does some trivial math, points out there's an overflow, and then says "Clearly some code in Windows didn’t handle this too well, and Windows hung."
Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
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Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#12Nowadays you don't even get CLOSE to 49 days uptime before Win10 forces you to restart due to updates ;s
My laptop with Win10 is at 72 days. I created a bat file with: net stop wuauserv sc config wuauserv start= disabled and then scheduled it to run every 10 minutes. The problem with that is you now have to remember to disable it and check for updates when you have time, which I'm obviously not doing.
You're oddly proud about not having updated your OS for 72 days.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#13Is there a good way to test for bugs like this during development? Since it’s not particularly realistic to pause development for two months to see what a given build does after that long.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
My laptop with Win10 is at 72 days. I created a bat file with: net stop wuauserv sc config wuauserv start= disabled and then scheduled it to run every 10 minutes. The problem with that is you now have to remember to disable it and check for updates when you have time, which I'm obviously not doing.
You're oddly proud about not having updated your OS for 72 days.
No, I'm proud that I haven't rebooted in 72 days. The last clause was me acknowledging that this isn't good computer hygiene.
edit: And I'm trying to help other people. I know how infuriating it is to have your computer restart in the middle of something, and the above fix is pretty straightforward.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
My laptop with Win10 is at 72 days. I created a bat file with: net stop wuauserv sc config wuauserv start= disabled and then scheduled it to run every 10 minutes. The problem with that is you now have to remember to disable it and check for updates when you have time, which I'm obviously not doing.
You're oddly proud about not having updated your OS for 72 days.
Or that you have to jump through hoops to get your OS to do what you want it to do.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#16This brings up a good meta point: people who like to complain about the quality of software in the modern world almost certainly didn't live through the early[1] days of the industry.
This sounds crazy to modern ears, but at the time the idea of a desktop system actually staying booted for a whole month was weird and alien. They just didn't do that. Commercial unixes were better. It was routine to find servers that had been running for three digit (!!) uptimes, and people would brag about stuff like this. Linux, when it arrived, was in this category too and we'd all puff to our friends about how we "never turn off" the machine under our desk, because it would always be able to run for a month or so before it crashed.
It was just a different world, and things, despite some of the community emotion, have gotten vastly better. We're much better at writing software than we used to be, which tends to make some of old folks a little confused when people hold up "new" ideas as being paradigm shifts in software quality.
We already had the shift! We're just picking the higher hanging fruit now.
[1] Do the mid-90's even count as early?
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
My laptop with Win10 is at 72 days. I created a bat file with: net stop wuauserv sc config wuauserv start= disabled and then scheduled it to run every 10 minutes. The problem with that is you now have to remember to disable it and check for updates when you have time, which I'm obviously not doing.
You're oddly proud about not having updated your OS for 72 days.
About 15 years ago, I worked at a startup that had a server with 5 years of uptime!
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#18Is there a good way to test for bugs like this during development? Since it’s not particularly realistic to pause development for two months to see what a given build does after that long.
When you start development version of Windows CE or Windows Embedded (don’t remember exactly which one) tick count timer wasn’t set to zero but max dword minus number of milliseconds in two minutes. So counter overflows in 2 minutes after system start. This is very smart way to catch such bugs.
Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#19Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime
#20In fairness, I have hit this exact same problem on Linux