Windows 7 Beta

I’m generally slow to change operating systems..  When it comes to making one of those sweeping changes, traditionally I was the equivalent of an old man on his porch yelling for “you kids to get off my lawn!”   I was a curmudgeon and quite often would refuse to budge.

I didn’t switch to Windows 95 until sometime in 97.. I didn’t switch to 98 until 99.. I didn’t go to NT at all, and stayed on W2k Pro until well after XP was out.  The only reason I went XP was because it was on the new computer I had purchased already..

My reason for not wanting to upgrade to the newest version of windows was usually because it’s painful, the upgrade sucks and quite often I have to go back.  (I wont even go into my Windows ME story.. I had one of the Microsoft Windows ME tell me to go back to 98 because ME sucked…  Yeah.. It happened..)

More over upgrading isn’t the way to go.. you should wipe fresh and start over..  I usually dreaded this..   What cured that?  Funnily enough, Ubuntu..

I have installed and reinstalled ubuntu so many times I’m an old hat at it..  It’s really easy.    So I went into Windows 7 thinking it was going to be back to the pain..  And was pleasantly surprised..

Firstly what Windows 7 isn’t;  It isn’t a new OS.  Lets be clear here.. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been.  It’s more than a reskin to be sure, but mostly it’s a refactor of Vista and a general rebranding to get away from the down right awful publicity that Vista rightly deserved..

Having said that, I like W7 quite a bit actually.  I have had some issues getting my sound card drivers working, but now that I do everything’s peachy.   Because it’s entirely based on the Vista core just download and install Vista drivers for it and asa rule you’re good to go.

The install process was simple and clean, and since I installed it on a new drive it correctly put the windows bootloader on the main drive (though it did overwrite my grub loader so now I can’t get into linux.. will have to add the linux install to windows bootloader..)    The install was fairly quick all things considered, and it configured all my hardware correctly.

I had World of Warcraft up and running within about 3 minutes of installing the OS because I had precopied it to the drive heh.   Yay I have DX10 now!

My biggest complaint at this point is two fold;  1. the alt+tab functionality seems really slow and clunky in W7.. In XP its instant.. but for whatever reason in W7 it takes a couple seconds.. Minor complaint though really.. it is a beta after all..

Secondly, I want to know what will happen in August when the license expires..  Will I just be screwed and have to reinstall all over again?  They have already stated that you wont be able to install the automatic updates beyond that point and that the OS will die then.. I find that… Odd..

OH well.. I can say that I would likely purchase this OS if it continues to perform as nicely as it does now.  Since it’s the premier gaming platform for PC’s at this point I don’t have much choice.. heh

I still very much like my Mac.. I still very much like Ubuntu.. but the games demand Dx10, so Vista.. er,  Windows 7 it is..

Firstly, what it’s not;

The blizzard folks over at their forums, as well as those you get ahold of on the phone.. and via email will try to blame everything on you.  The reason for this will come clear shortly, but in a way they are right and in a way wrong.

The World of Warcraft #134 error is so vague and broad in scope that it is the support equivalent to, “It broke!”…  It could be any number of things, but the thing they just about always tell you it is, is memory.  Read the forums and you’ll always see some asshat chiming in that it must be your memory..  The issue I had with that response is that I had run tests against my 4 gigs of memory both in linux, and in windows using multiple tools as well as testing each stick individually..  My memory was flawless every time.. even using the test blizzard suggested I use.

Once I proved that, they suddenly tried to blame some other facet of my hardware..  Long story short, everything they suggested WAS WRONG.  Period..

So I got to looking into why they always insisted it was memory.. And how the MPQ files which should be read-only archives of data were getting corrupted.    Why the hell was blizzard writing back to those files..

(Note: most of this is what I have gleaned while looking into it as well as relying on my own and coworkers programming knowledge.. it’s not 100% for sure, but an edjumikated guess.)

The MPQ files that WoW uses contain all the various objects, models, textures and what nots that the game needs to play.   The majority of those things are textures that the system needs to constantly load to display..  The problem is the MPQ’s are many gigs in size, and as of yet no graphics card has that much on board memory..  Nor do most systems have enough space to load the entire game into memory..  To get around this blizzard employed a technique called memory mapping.

Without going into too much detail, the addresses for the chunks of the data it needs is mapped directly to the hard drive and stuffed into the graphics card memory.. (Or more likely into main memory, then replicated into the graphics card memory.. but thats not important.)  These functions are controlled by windows entirely and out of the games control.  That’s why there is writing going on. For the most part they use this technique to speed things up other wise your computers hard drive and bus would be completely hammered trying to shuffle all the textures around.. And WoW is nothing if not texture packed..

Any time anything changes in memory, it writes those changes directly back to the file — this is simply due to the nature of memory mapping in windows..  (playing WoW in Linux will not have this problem, it will have a completely different problem if the ultimate issue is the same)

If there are no changes, then nothing gets written back — this is what’s supposed to happen as blizzard knows (or assumes) that the textures wont get changed.  But lets say something did change and blizzard knows that their client didn’t make that change.. The only thing that could have happened was something broke.

This is the reason blizzard naturally tells you that your memory is bad, and often why they say virus scanners could play a part too, or even a hard drive.. If the memory went bad then a couple bits would change forcing windows to write back to the MPQ corrupting it.. Or if there is bad sectors on the hard drive where the pagefile is, same problem.. etc..

What it actually was;

What they fail to tell you about is.. what if the memory on your graphics card is bad? That’s much harder to test..

My problem ended up being a bug with the EVGA built nVidia 8800GTX graphics card. Apparently the fan on the graphics card wouldn’t correctly auto-increase in speed which meant my graphics card over heated at some point.. (You can download the EVGA Precision tool to fix this manually) Which ultimately meant the memory on my graphics card started to corrupt.. It only got worse as time went on because the heat problem continued to be an issue, eventually causing the card to die completely.

The 8800GTX was a great card and it worked for me flawlessly for 2 years before this issue showed up so I can’t complain about it at all.. The main issue with it was it routinely operated around 80 degrees Celsius.. With an operational ceiling of 105… that’s pretty slim margins and almost begs to overheat..

But, In a weird way, the blizzard folks were right; it was a memory issue. Just not in the way they were insisting it was.. What they didn’t realize and probably still don’t realize was that it wasn’t system memory that was causing the corruption. More over, none of the tests they suggest would have ever revealed any of those issues.

From my perspective, my system was working flawlessly because unless a software package actually tried to use any of the faulty memory on the graphics card, everything appeared to work perfectly. I still have the 8800gtx card and can plug it into a system right now and so long as you don’t try to play a game on it, it works perfectly in windows and linux.

For me the fix meant I had to replace my graphics card.. I pop’ed the 8800gtx out and installed a nVidia GTX 285 and everything works peachy.. My system is back up and happy and so am I. For a while there I was dreading playing the game because I knew it would crash any second..

My new card under full load operates at 51ºc (thirty degrees cooler than the 8800 at idle) and all is well…

The thing I really take out of this is how poorly I was treated by the blizzard support folks. I’m actually aghast at how bad their support is. Not because they couldn’t come up with a fix, this was a tough one.. but because they were so nonchalant about it and didn’t seem to remotely care.

After all, I’m just one of eleven million subscribers.. who gives a crap if I’m happy right?

If you’re having #134′s, check to make sure your system isn’t over heating.. Run the various memory testers, but keep in mind that you have memory on your graphics card that as far as I know, you can’t test and it could be the culprit. If you have tried everything else, try swapping in a new graphics card..

Good luck.

Why can’t people discussing intelligent software solutions from different paradigms agree to disagree on this point.. and move the hell on?!

It drives me insane that you always have these hard core zealots that spout about how their OS is the best and that Microsoft sucks. You should use Linux cause it is better than Microsoft.. No no.. You should use a Mac because a “Wintel” machine sucks.. No the Amiga was the best! (I miss my Amiga).. etc etc.

I hate it.. Everyone hates Microsoft..

Do a search for “windows sucks” on Google and see what you get.. Good luck sifting through it all.. Everyone of them hard core Microsoft fans.. All of them are completely unbiased I’m sure..

Firstly.. ALL OSes are crap. None of them have got it right. They all have problems. It bothers me though that any time I have any kind of problem with my computer, which may or may not be completely unrelated to the OS, some sycophant from another flavor of “craptacular” will chime in and tell me that the problem is due to the OS I’m using, and that specifically Microsoft sucks.. if I just switched to {enter other shitty os name here} all my woe’s would be solved.

Ya know what there sport, if that were true don’t ya think it would have happened already? I’m pretty sure I don’t need you to tell me which way the wind blows. If your OS was so much better, I bet I would have noticed by now..

I use Linux, everyday.. No thanks – it doesn’t fit the bill, I don’t like it.. and I find it largely a pain in the ass..

I’ve seen and used a Mac.. No thanks – it doesn’t do what I need. Again, good for some things, but doesn’t do everything I want.. Etc..

No no.. that’s not enough.. They must convert me!

Even now some asshat is reading this just waiting for the end so they can dive off into their pre-scripted rant about how if I just tried their OS it would be better.. OR, even more infuriating, about how I just don’t understand and I must be some drooling sub-par computer half-wit who barely knows how to flip the I/O button to make the flashy lights go..

Clearly since I like Microsoft or in my case because I tolerate it, I must be one of those sad pathetic people who don’t know better. Pity me – For I am lame.

Here’s the 411 people..

I don’t “like” Microsoft or Windows. I use it. I use it because it’s all I got. At best, I tolerate it. And when something stupid goes wrong for no reason what so ever, I have same psychopathic desire to kill small animals just like everyone else.. It’s what I got.. So I use it.

Linux has stupid, crappy and jacked-up issues with it, just like the Mac.. just like Windows.. Get over yourself.

But to keep it simple for you people, I can sum it all up to ONE reason. I have ONE reason why I use Microsoft over any other OS – One reason that NO OTHER OS can beat; GAMES.

That’s it. I believe I have won that argument. You lose.

The games that I play, I can only play on a windows machine.

Dos, Linux, BSD, AIX, Mac, IRIX, Solaris, FreeBSD, BeoS, CP/M, CLI, LCARS. Whatever operating system you choose.. they don’t have the games..

None of them do.

Stop telling me that my OS sucks.. Thanks.. I got it.. Shut the fuck up..

My OS may suck, but I got the games baby..

And until your OS, whatever it may be, has those same games.. It’s with windows I’ll stay. Suck or not.