Computer question

[Shy Tall Guy]

Re: Re: Re: And while we're expounding on the tech side of Windows ...

Another motivation behind it was stability of the OS. No application is allowed to access any hardware device directly; EVERY device available is accessed via system service calls.

Agreed, but I am not sure that is true in every case; different processes with a high privilege can access system devices directly (such as video card drivers and so on) - not technically an application, but some applications can do that if installed with the privileges to do so. Debuggers for example do get down into the system (I think - I haven't written one, I just use them).

A program attempting to access hardware directly or memory outside that assigned to it by the OS is terminated.

Not sure if that is technically true - it depends on how well behaved the app is; I think it is only terminated if the app can't recover from the GPF. It has been a while since I have delved into NT internals.

Unfortunately, it was in use by the prior instance of the same program which had crashed. The solution, shutdown and restart!

Yep - NT is a lot more stable; but it can still be flaky, especially with devices; I just put an older CDR/RW drive into my PC, and it worked for a while (although the burner software {Adaptec} wouldn't work because it was too old), but the CDRW reading software (CD Direct) was causing crashes. It finally got to the point where I had to uninstall it this morning.

OTOH, W2K and I imagine XP and ME, are very good about Plug and Play; I bought a SCSI card for my old HP scanner because the non-ISA SCSI card that came with the scanner wouldn't work with NT. I put it in the computer, plugged in and turned on the scanner, and W2K saw both the SCSI card and the scanner and I didn't have to do anything - all driver software was installed automagically and I could use the scanner in all my imaging apps (like Photoshop).