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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

#41

Post by srcmap »

7777fps wrote: post #12
tsomctl wrote: post #10

Earlier 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.

Choices are:

Allow Windows 10 auto update but for a chance for it to delete all your profile / data files PERMANENTLY :

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-10-k... (February 19, 2020)

Or

Turn off auto update with user control on when is best time to update:

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#42

Post by ryanschneider »

I worked on a service that had this exact issue; actually it was worse because it was a signed integer so rolled over in half the time.

Even more insidious, we never hit the issue until months into production because we had a pretty consistent two week release process. So the issue only came to light when development slowed down as the project became more stable.

Luckily deployments were staggered across datacenters so when the bug hit it didn’t happen to every server at once, but of course as always happens, when it did, the majority of the servers started hanging over the weekend while I was on call.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#43

Post by badsectoracula »

ajross wrote: post #16

This 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 h…

I do often complain about the quality of software but that is because i complain about the quality of most of the software. The foundation we work on is usually much more robust than what it was in the 90s, it is the stuff that we build on top that is shaky.

And a big issue (at least on the desktop) is that in many cases we keep throwing away old stuff and reinvent new stuff with their new bugs and issues, instead of fixing that old stuff (and i do not think that it is a coincidence that most of the stable foundation is actually old stuff that had a lot of people trying to fix its issues instead of throwing everything away).

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#44

Post by baybal2 »

tsomctl wrote: post #14
7777fps wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think having to disable the autoupdate in win10 is the most requested thing for IT helpdesks these days.

As a result of this complete ignorance to ergonomics, the windows ecosystem is returning back to WinXP years, and windows users are now getting pwned by years old exploits again.

I think microsoft best achievement in win7 was that it was working "out of the box" without having to hack it. Now, win10 again requires to be hacked right out of the box just to work.

People now install stuff like https://www.novirusthanks.org/products/win-update-stop/ or https://securityxploded.com/windows-autoupdate-disable.php and countless others.

But when they finally need to update, the half broken windows install may give up the ghost, because the update script can't account for hundreds of ways how windows internals may have been altered, and so they learn to not to update at all, and switch to antiviruses, qihoo and other "crapware clearners" in the end

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#45

Post by yummybear »

usr1106 wrote: post #37
ggambetta wrote: post #11

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."

I don't agree. Nobody of the readers would care about the programming error made 25 years ago in some closed source code. However, timers wrapping around is a very current problem every programmer should be aware of. Not too long ago we had a problem with corrupted video files. After weeks of investigation it turned out that some code used an 32 bit unsigned to count microseconds. Well, that wraps around after approx…

I'm a reader and care, so at least one.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#46

Post by barrkel »

ajross wrote: post #16

This 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 h…

Coding in DOS, saving before executing your program became a reflex because any hard freeze in your program would force you to reset the machine. It wasn't rare, and practically unavoidable if you're trying to do something clever like a TSR. Or doing something interesting with graphics - if you got left in a weird mode, you might have to type blind to recover, or give up and reset.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#47

Post by barrkel »

jaclaz wrote: post #40
ajross wrote: post #16

This 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 h…

Well, there are huge differences (in the MS world) between 9x and NT. DOS (before) was very, very stable (but of course was not multitasking) and widely used in industrial setups. Windows NT (before Win9x) and Windows 2000 (right after) were both, very, very stable, I had machines running 24/7/365 that were rebooted once a year or so and for other reasons (maintenance/update, hardware replacement, black outs longer t…

DOS wasn't functional enough to be described as stable; it did almost nothing but look after the files on your file system and provide a few APIs, via interrupts, for programs to read and write files and perform console I/O. Stability was almost entirely the responsibility of the program you ran on top.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#48

Post by dylan604 »

ajross wrote: post #16

This 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 h…

In the early days of web-hosting providers, it was common to see a version of Linux and a version of Windows as options. Only the Linux servers came with an uptime guarantee.

Re: Why Windows 95 and 98 would crash after 49.7 days of uptime

#50

Post by icedchai »

chrisbennet wrote: post #25
icedchai wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 15 years ago, I worked at a startup that had a server with 5 years of uptime!

DEC computers were know for their reliability.

This was a generic, rack mount Intel server running Debian 3.x.
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