re: event veiwer.
You beat me to the punch on how resource heavy the new event veiwer is, but getting teary eyed for the old one? Really?
Yes, the old event viewer loaded quickly. It also closed just as snappily after you discovered it had recorded bugger all that would give you a clue as to why the machine had suffered a major breakdown and rebooted.
Just last week we had one user who was suffering frequent crashes. At first we put it down to errant software. After all, the XP install on her machine was nearly 5 years old, and had been passed through many users, filling up with crapware. After trying various band-aids and little fixes we bit the bullet and remastered her machine.
This seemed to fix it, until a few days later, it crashed again. The BSOD indicated a memory problem this time, so roll out memtest and various other diags. There was NOTHING in the XP event viewer to even give me a hint, even with all the logs switched to full. It passed with flying colours. By this point, my slightly cynical nature started leading me to suspect it was somehow user instigated.
We put Win7 on her machine, as we've found in practice it's a lot more resiliant and idiot-proof than XP. Again fine for a few days, then I get another call. This time, it had only lost network connectivity. I look in the event viewer, and there it was. I can't remember the exact phasing, but it stated that the HAL had failed to retrieve information from RAM after resuming from sleep.
Bingo. A BIOS update to fix the *known* bug in the ACPI firmware, and we're all sorted. I suppose a lesson to be learnt would be slightly less cynical. When I asked her what she was doing at the time of crash and she said "nothing" I might have realised she litterally meant nothing, hence the machine went to sleep.
Whereas XP refused to even admit that the machine had even rebooted, Win7 just barely stopped short of whipping the side panel off the case and pointing at the chip!
Of course, this is known as self diagnosis and monitoring, or as my collegue amusingly refers, 'naval staring', and we're seeing it more commonly everywhere. Most modern cars will simply tell you exactly what's gone wrong when you plug a laptop in.
I was indulging in a bit of 'motherboard reading' the other day, and spotted a connector I didn't recognise. After some googling I found it was for a motherboard tester that checked every single pathway and chip. The controller chip for that connector had it's own internal bus bridge between the V1 and V2 extended diags.
Wait, what? even the motherboard self diagnostic chip is so advanced now it has multiple internal clock speeds? The self analysis systems within modern computers and the Windows OS are getting ever more advanced and resilliant, but the laws of physics dictate that that these diags have to use resources.
So, can I begrudge the event view taking a few seconds longer to open? Not really. If I'd had Win7 on that machine to start with, it would have save both me and the user a week and a half of mucking about, and I can easily foresee it saving me a lot more time in the future