On Mon, 2003-02-17 at 16:33, Adam Thornton wrote: > I beg to differ. Unless you mean "Crashes of computers running Windows > are rarely caused by hardware." My desktop machine *usually* crashes, > when it crashes, because of the hardware. Sometimes it's a cooling > problem (luckily my system senses overtemperature and shuts itself > down), sometimes it's an insufficiently conditioned power supply. > Before that it was the flaky NVidia video card, which I eventually > replaced.
Another point of interest (albeit an old point) is the case of the Pentium Pro. Intel billed and sold this processor as scalable to 4 way when the processor bus saturated at 2 way. When OSes, mainly windows, could not scale above 2 way the blame was laid firmly upon companies like Microsoft. Here's another one, remember the Aproximatium (catchy little phrase for the nasty math error that Intel shipped). Recent history documents more hardware errors than we could ever account for here. Each revision of processor, and it's respective implementation, has it's warts, they get fixed, they get bad press and they cause crashes at the desktop and in the data center.
