What will make this work
(for large values of "work") is that Windows users will likely think 'ah, M$ has finally got it right and gone all modern, and when that link is followed, there will be a pot of informational gold at the end of it'.
Microsoft has added a QR code to its infamous Blue Screen of Death in Windows 10. As of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 14316, when the operating system falls over, you get not only the sad ASCII smiley but also a QR square that contains an encoded URL that leads you to a webpage about your problem. Scan it with a smartphone …
Ahh ... I see where this is going. All those billions of blue screens need an Android device, you say? Will the app be paid for, or just show ads?
Download the Micros0ft Windows 10 diagnostic app for Android"
Actually, this would be a very handy tool that would mean the blue screen QR code only needs to contain an error code and such information - in fact it could be a series of QR codes. The Win diag app would then control the web interaction, making it harder to fake the blue screen etc...
Obviously, versions for iOS etc. would also be useful.
in fact it could be a series of QR codes.
Sure. And what will stop a fake crash screen to display a malware URL anyway instead of just crash diagnostic codes? What percentage of users (that have an Android with the app installed in the first place) will fire up that app first to let it grab the codes, instead of blindly pointing it at the screen and tapping the 'go fetch' button?
It doesn't matter that the QR from a genuine crash shows diagnostic codes only, it matters what a fake crash displays and how users deal with that.
>This would spoil the fun of trying to grab the error code on a Windows blue screen, which only flashes up for 500ms. Pre-digital camera era.
Disable automatic restart on BSOD, simple, I always do ... I know MS tries to hide these from the user, but it does not really help, does it?
My fav has always been "Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer." Now, if Windows damages computers, why do 99.99% of computers on the market come with it pre-installed ?
"Disable automatic restart on BSOD, simple, I always do ... I know MS tries to hide these from the user, but it does not really help, does it?"
It helps a lot on a remote server where the BSOD may have been a one-off and you want the thing to start back up on it's own. A lot of servers may not even have monitors attached.
Did always wonder why there wasn't the option to restart automatically after say 60 seconds.. but I guess you can achieve the same result by asking it to do a full dump.
Maybe have a small diagnostic partition. Of course if the hard drive shits the bed, this won't work. But if it is one of the more common BSODs, it should be able to write to it fine. And by being on a separate partition, it shouldn't hose the filesystem.
As for the servers, maybe have the screen flash for, say 1 minute? That way it gives you time to get the code while still allowing headless servers to reboot.
I only have an old instamatic, let me get a picture, send it off, wait for the print, scan it, run it through the QR-reader software, visit the URL, run the reader software again because this has to be a wind-up, surely they would not have a web page that just said "err=unknown_driver_fail please uninstall the driver for Unknown Device" and nothing else...?
Or maybe I could take a shortcut around this whole insane process and use tracing paper and scan that instead?
Actually it doesn't seem like a bad idea, I just have no faith that the page you end up at will be of any use whatsoever and will simply add a delay and another swearing session before you swear and format and reinstall like you were going to do anyway. (admittedly I never entirely understood the logic of those who always did this)
"surely they would not have a web page that just said "err=unknown_driver_fail please uninstall the driver for Unknown Device" and nothing else...?"
Oh, yes they would!
Reminds me of the old IBM error messages that used to say something like "Error 10042fcd occurred" and you thought oh goodie that's nice and specific, the big blue book will tell me what's wrong. So you got out the big blue book and looked at the list of error codes, and the numbers jumped from 10042fc7 to 10042fe0 or something like that. Gah! Foiled again, curse you, Red Baron!
> Nobody else would admit to using Bing !
Yes they would, I typed a film name in Google, told me it was on at a cinema 20 miles away.
Typed the name in Bing, show times for my local cinema, 1 mile and the next one, 8 miles.
Also a link to a trailer that wasn't some scam trailer forcing me to dump it and keep looking in the YouTube nightmare.
Very damn useful, anything that stops one needing to operate within YT is useful to me.
I had a similar issue trying to get Kubuntu (the version of Ubuntu with the KDE desktop) 15.10 to work . The installer kept crashing before the installation was complete. It took a lot of tries, but it finally finished installing.
Twenty seconds or so after booting, it would either stop responding to the keyboard and mouse clicks or go into a full kernel panic (if you thought the XP/Vista/7 BSOD was bad, try the Linux version). It failed in one of these two ways every time, whether I booted from the installation USB drive or from the boot device (SSD).
So much for the vaunted "never crashes" Linux.
I was given a pc a couple of years ago, the owner was that fed up of win7 and win8 crashing on him he was going to have a ceremonial burning in the garden. I rescued it and installed ubuntu, it would be fine for days then crash, reinstall, rinse, repeat. Eventually i tracked down the fault to a dodgy sata cable. So for the cost of a 3 quid cable i've now got a shiny stable workstation. The original owner spent 800 quid on a new pc... Which crashes, reinstall ...
Crap hardware will crash anything, windows, linux, MSDOS 1.1ish (my first OS , them wer't days).
Just as a matter of interest was it a red generic SATA cable with no locking mechanism and straight connectors either end? I have had nothing but issues with them. Drive read errors, drives disappearing. My systems have been purged of them and replaced with locking quality cables. A crap SATA cable is something easily overlooked but is a cause of random crashing especially if the system drive cable is bad intermittently.
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"Ubuntu runs Firefox just fine. You think if it didn't, no one would have noticed? Your fault finding doesn't impress me"
Way back, when Ubuntu first went to Upstart, it became more difficult to diagnose incompatibilities between H/W & drivers or config settings. It was that issue with regard to graphics that pushed me off Ubuntu onto Debian. Of course when Debian Wheezy goes out of LTS and it's wall-to-wall systemd that particular solution will have been lost.
So I believe the OP. "Works for me" is not an example of skilled fault finding but unfortunately it always seemed to be the staple of a few voluble Linux fan-boys.
>When trying out a recent Ubuntu, I got it to kernel panic simply by trying to run Firefox.
Not possible, the kernel panic cannot be related to firefox, it just happened at exactly that moment ... it must have been something else, did you compile the kernel yourself ?
I have never seen Linux throw a kernel panic outside of boot phase, and then, the last one I saw was related to a dodgy sound driver, that I compiled. The one before that was in 2001, and I use Linux daily, since at least 1999 on laptops, desktops, etc...