Ask HN: How can Windows be so easily brought to its knees by apps, drivers, etc?
2 by BipVap | 0 comments on Hacker News.
From a technical perspective, what is it about Windows 10 that allows applications to bring the entire system to its knees??? It seems to me that if a process is misbehaving, it is a problem for that process alone, not for other processes and especially not for the host operating system. Yet time and time again Windows 10 is vulnerable to episodes of unresponsiveness, even to the point of having to resort to a power cycle. Today I opened Edge and Firefox, along with Visual Studio (not doing anything). I also had a VirtualBox VM was running Ubuntu. Its only activity was a terminal session running top. The browsers had 5 or 6 open tabs. Most tabs were static pages just sitting there. From Edge I had a video stream playing and was attempting a screen recording using a browser extension. Left for 5 minutes after which I could barely get a response from any app or Windows. Video stream was hung. Mouse would move but if I clicked on a tab or app nothing happened. Ctrl-Alt-Del did nothing. Click on upper right 'X' on any application did nothing. Right click an application group in the task bar and select 'Close all windows' did nothing. Right-clicking an empty spot of the task bar did not launch a pop-up menu. Alt-Tab worked, sort of. It would show its list of windows. But releasing Alt-Tab for any window did not switch to that window. Technically, what is it about Windows that allows applications to bring the entire system to its knees??? It is a question I've asked for as long as I've used Windows (Dabbled with Windows 1.x and 2.x, became regular user with Win 3.1) Tho' Windows' reliability improved over the decades, it continues to be vulnerable to apps, services and drivers that veer off into the weeds.