The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

This so much reminds me of a struggle in the Toshiba Tecra 750CDT era: [WayBack] Delphi Code Monkey: Cool Advanced Troubleshooting Technique – WinDbg.

First about Warren’s issue:

His laptop froze only in Windows 10, but not Windows 7, after doing some debugging work. Display is on, but non-responsive. He ruled out a lot of things, thought it was a video issue, looked for pointers how to research it ending to force memory dumps by keyboard then running WinDbg to further pinpoint the cause.

He solved the issue by removing the Lenovo supplied Intel graphics driver and forcing the Intel HD Graphics 520 OEM drivers onto the system and posted a few interesting links:

• [WayBack] freeze – Thinkpad Edge Series Laptop Keeps Freezing on Windows 10 – Intel HD Graphics 520 – Super User including instructions on how to force a memory dump by keyboard (different for PS/2 and USB HID keyboards)
• [WayBack] Forcing a System Crash from the Keyboard | Microsoft Docs
• [WayBack] Defrag Tools | Channel 9 – Andrew Richards, Chad Beeder and Larry Larsen host this deep dive into the tools used to troubleshoot systems.
  • [WayBack] Defrag Tools #183 – WinDbg Preview Part 2 | Defrag Tools | Channel 9
  • [WayBack] Defrag Tools #182 – WinDbg Preview Part 1 | Defrag Tools | Channel 9

Then some history:

Back in the 750CDT days, the problem was the combination of Toshiba using OEM S3 Virge/MX video drivers, Windows GDI and TImageList with a lot of images in them (basically: the component palette).

Result: interrupt freeze of the laptop, so not even mouse or keyword would work.

Solutions:

• use Windows NT, not Windows 95
• disable all S3 hardware acceleration
• use the Toshiba 780 series video drivers

From then on, I’ve never developed on Windows 9x based systems any more, but Windows NT based systems (even though it was much harder to get drivers for all hardware components), this despite the fact that with Windows NT 4, Microsoft video drivers from ring 3 to ring 0 (they were at ring 3 until and including Windows NT 3.51 [Archive.is]). On the one hand the move to ring 0 caused more blue screens, on the other hand made it a lot harder to directly access hardware from user software running at ring 3.

–jeroen