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Page 3 of 5 Delving into the technical details of what is changed in a particular version or service pack of Windows is hardly the stuff that the general user, or even system administrator needs to know. For instance, SP2 for XP introduces changes in memory management and the kernel of Windows 2003 was considerably modified in comparison to previous versions. As a result, applications that were running on Windows XP before the SP2 has been applied or before you upgraded to Windows 2003 might either not start at all, or hang (with or without a Blue Screen). Even if you know that the reason is kernel incompatibility, unless you are the developer who wrote the problematic program, you can hardly modify it to fix it, so you must look for alternatives. The wisest thing you can do is find an updated version (if any), which is tested under the version of Windows you need it for – XP with SP2 or 2003. Or you can choose to remove the problematic program from this machine – for instance SP2 for XP includes a firewall, which is known to have had conflicts with some other firewall software (and not only). Some of the other firewalls are pretty jealous to load first and I personally had a similar case with two other firewalls and Blue Screens on a Windows 2003 machine. The problem was solved only after one of the firewalls was removed. A very common reason for Blue Screens are drivers. Maybe they are even more common than physical hardware failure. Changes in memory management or the kernel affect drivers more than applications. Third-party vendors generally do not manage to deliver a new driver the moment a new version of Windows or a new Service Pack is released, even when they are making the efforts to do it. And in some cases they just never deliver a driver for a particular version of the operating system! It seems that hardware vendors largely skip Windows 2003 – even manufacturers of high-end hardware components say that Windows 2003 is not for the general public, so why bother delivering a separate driver for that? And probably from a sales point of view they are right. I could not find precise and up-to-date data about the percentage of installations each of the three operating systems (Windows 2000, XP, and 2003) has but a relatively recent article states that “XP May Catch Up to Win 2000 By Year's End”, which makes me think that even if XP has already dethroned 2000 as the most widely installed operating system, Windows 2003 is hardly in the game at all and my guess is that it makes hardly 10 percent of so from the overall number of Windows installations. Anyway, Windows is a server operating system and is not supposed to be running on kitchen PCs, so it's not a surprise that hardware vendors are not interested in it very much. The low market penetration of Windows 2003, together with its architectural changes from XP, explain why hardware vendors generally skip Windows 2003 in their driver assortment. And having in mind that Vista is over the horizon, it is not difficult to predict that there will not be many new drivers for Windows 2003 in the coming months. So, if you are running 2003 and have frequent Blue Screens because a driver (even if it is written specifically for Windows 2003) of a device misbehaves, you'd better consider downgrading to XP, while Vista (or Longhorn) officially arrives. I'll be talking more about (the downsides of) this in the next section. Steps for Preventing BSoDs and Minimizing Damage (And Avoiding Nervous Breakdown) Before I go on with handling Blue Screens, I would like to say a few words on how to prevent them. It is much wiser to prevent (when possible) than to handle a disaster. Do Not Pull the Devil by the Tail Having frequent Blue Screens is hardly a kind of entertainment and dealing with their consequences is not fun, either. But there are many things that one can do to minimize the risk of having them and the damage they can do. There are simple steps that are very helpful: - Get the appropriate drivers for the operating system you were running. And check for driver updates - although this might prove a double-edged sward because I can recall cases when the older version of a driver was working better than the latest one (not only in terms of stability).
- Generally it is better to make copies of the driver disks that come with your hardware but if you have already lost them and the vendor site does not offer suitable drivers for download, be very wary when solving the driver problem with a generic driver – in many cases it works perfectly but this is especially risky for causing Blue Screens.
- If you can't find drivers that are working, consider changing the hardware or the operating system. If you have just bought an expensive card you will hardly want to throw it, so maybe you should sacrifice the operating system (especially if it is Windows 2003 – there might never be a driver for it).
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