Well, debugger me. Microsoft's BSOD fixer is getting a makeover One of Microsoft's tools for debugging blue screens of death and other exciting Windows problems will be getting a bit easier to use. On Monday, Redmond announced a preview of a new Windows Debugger version with some UI tweaks including the iconic ribbon, a tidied-up file menu, a history of previous sessions and a scripting …
Microsoft is a complete fail.
Yet still, no actionable F8 KEY to boot into safe mode, or load "Last Known Good Configuration" (an option in Win7 that was extremely handy and a quick method of resolution when an incompatible "key" driver was installed by mistake). Try solving that in Windows 10, it's an absolute nightmare without the Last Known Good Configuration option, when it won't boot into Windows even under safe mode.
Killing Windows on boot 3 times to break the boot cycle, is a nice way to add to S.M.A.R.T hard disk data of forced power offs, but it's not an elegant way to debug a system, F8 worked.
Weird isn't it.
Isn't this the company where one of the "leaders" was once famous for the mantra "developers! developers! developers!".
Should it now be "clueless! clueless! clueless!"?
Would anybody like to bet a Windows 7 licence or two that the changes to WinDbg are more about *hiding* things and preventing easy access to things (e.g, "high value content", see also Trusted Computing Platform et seq) than they are about improving the Windows customer/developer experience?
ps
ODT? Maybe. Others with slightly shorter memories (but more memory) might prefer SDA or even XDELTA. What is Cutler up to these days, is he still usefully employed at MS?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2GV_bCfnCw&t=164
or from the beginning:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2GV_bCfnCw
"ODT? Maybe. Others with slightly shorter memories (but more memory) might prefer SDA or even XDELTA."
Back in the day, when I was maintaining a particularly touchy VXD for the old 9x line(1), I used Soft-Ice. Sadly, it's no longer with us, but I really liked it.
(1) File-access interceptor for an on-access virus scanner, if you must know. My manager worked on the equivalent thing for NT, and he also used Soft-Ice.
Unfortunately if you hide the ribbon, the toolbars don't come back and the menus don't go back to the way they were.
People don't want the old way because they don't like change, they want the old way because the new way was worse. If MS had come up with a change that was better, people wouldn't still be complaining 10 years on.
Some bits aren't *for* beginners, microsoft.
Some bits are to tell those that aren't beginners what to do and where to go. Your average person knows they might have to pay someone to fix their computer in just the same way that many/most pay for repairs to cars, plumbing, or whatever.
Top of the list of "shit we didn't think needed changing much" was this. It's not a huge list. The huge list is the things we would actually like to see changed, gone or added.
"Some bits aren't *for* beginners, microsoft."
It could be argued that Windows itself fits into this category. The beginners have iPads now; they can do everything they want to that thing and the chances of getting it good and screwed up are minimal. There's no need to know anything about computing to use one; the fact that the thing has a file system somewhere under all of that UI is completely hidden, so great is the level of abstraction. For people who really and truly only want to use (the web, Facebook, whatever) and not understand it or develop any actual skill or knowledge that would result in them NOT being a beginner anymore, a device dumbed down and locked down is probably the best choice for them.
I would not want to use such a thing. I would want to be able to change things and get at the nitty-gritty underneath. An iPad is like a car with the hood (bonnet?) welded shut... no thanks. The ability to mess things up is power... you can't have power and "for beginners" at the same time. The people who never needed a full PC in the first place (but had to have one back when that was the only way to use the internet) have moved on to mobile devices; those of us left in the "real computer" space are not here because of ease-of-use.
I am sure there are exceptions; there are always a few. Still, I think that those of us who remain in PC circles (not just professional IT people that are in unusually high concentration here on this site for obvious reasons) are not simply a randomly-sampled subset of the PC usership that existed in the pre-smartphone days.
Upvote because I have an iPad (won it) and you're completely right - it is PERFECT for people who don't like computers or tech stuff but want to look at websites and such.
My problems with it? When I want to do stuff I keep running into brick walls because geek expectations are not the same as, say, my mother's expectations. So my phone runs Android... Parts of that are locked down, but I can at least go delete unwanted logfiles, temp files, and all the usual sorts of rubbish that clutter things up...
If windbg wasn't supposed to be used by beginners, then !analyze -v wouldn't exist. Think about that for a second, your argument is essentially that all conveniences should be stripped away and everyone, pros and neophytes alike, should be made to suffer more, because suffering through it is what makes you a pro.
Far better to get beginners used to working with windbg and ease them into the more complex parts of debugging so that some of them can become pros. Anyone who would use windbg in the first place is already someone who wants to be a pro anyway, it's not exactly a mass-market application.
"Yep, something happened all right. Sorry. :("
back in the day, as a prank, I once changed one of the error messages of a PDP-11 computer running RSTS/E . It was an obscure error message, caused by NOT saving the source before running a program [then having certain errors happen].
The error message was "?Program lost. Sorry."
I changed it to "?Program lost. TOUGH SHIT"
A week went by. Then the system operator did a 'nudge nudge wink wink' figuring it was me and asked me how he might fix it. I helped out saying things like "Well... I think the error messages are all stored in this one file..." and ended up hovering over him while he typed [logged in as an operator of course].
In any case, an appropriate change to the BSOD might be good for a laugh or two.
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Here's hoping they add a default online source for symbols.
Or at least default to "SRV*c:\temp\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols"
The rest I don't care about but please save me from a quick google for symbol location/path every time I use it once per 2 years :(
BlueScreenView -- http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html
Scans all your minidump files created during "blue screen of death" crashes and displays the information about all crashes in one table. For each crash, BlueScreenView displays the minidump filename, the date/time of the crash, the basic crash information displayed in the blue screen (Bug Check Code and 4 parameters), and the details of the driver or module that possibly caused the crash (filename, product name, file description, and file version).
Simply unpack the ZIP and run the EXE. The crash suspects are highlighted with a pink background.
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