[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > For instance, I was happily running Office 97 under NT when the computer > > guys decided to give me an upgrade to Office 2000. Whether this event was > > related or not with other upgrades, shortly thereafter I got a failure to > > Speaking of upgrades breaking things, I once had a machine that would > occasionally crash running Protel under Windows 95, and I decided to upgrade it > to Windows 2000 that was then in Beta. Windows 2000 died immediately every time. > Investigating revealed that I had been using the machine with a SIMM module that > had 3 pins not soldered for over a year! I fixed the SIMM and the problems went > away. It seems Protel was the only thing under Win95 that actually used the > highest blocks of memory, while Windows 2000 used all of memory right away. > > So sometimes a software problem is really hardware.
I think there is really a LOT more of this going on than people are aware of. I had an experience very early in my migration to Linux that brought this out. Long before that, I was in the middle of my biggest PCB design up to that time, using the last DOS version of Accel's Tango PCB. Things started going wrong faster than I could fix them, ie. half the board being lost when you closed and reopened the file, etc. So, I switched to Protel, which we had been evaluating for a while. I finished that project, and eventually the computer was retired to my basement. I tried to fire up Linux on it to experiment, and compiles of the kernel would consistantly quit with a signal 11, which is basically traceable to a bad page table lookup. Another identical motherboard worked fine. Obviously, I had been running Windows 3.1 and PCB cad software for several years on bad hardware! And, I'd been blaming the software for all of it. (Yes, the repeatable bugs I had with Tango WERE the software, I still remember how to make the program malfunction in about 5 keystrokes!) Jon ************************************************************************ * Tracking #: 7F3FE30AF03A314B9082E4D28B701C9B14E596D5 * ************************************************************************ * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * To post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * To leave this list visit: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/leave.html * * Contact the list manager: * mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] * * Forum Guidelines Rules: * http://www.techservinc.com/protelusers/forumrules.html * * Browse or Search previous postings: * http://www.mail-archive.com/proteledaforum@techservinc.com * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
