Saturday, May 15, 2010

Windows 7 Pro 64bit bugs

Hi, again,

I'm sharing my findings regarding Windows 7. I'm using Win7 Pro edition 64 bit, free for the students of my university. I thought that it's very well made and bug-free - all those open beta testing must have improved the new Microsoft OS.
It is indeed very good and a perfect successor of Win XP (I skip the unsuccessful experiment Vista), but I've found a few bugs - some very hard to find, others - hard to miss!

1. Navigation with "Back button" in Control panel.

Basically the case is the following:
- you enter the new Control Panel design - one can see some groups of settings in the center and some quick shortcuts on the left side. If you move your mouse over these links, a hand-cursor appears and if you click them, you are transferred to the corresponding menu.
How to see the bug?
- just click on a clickable content in the window (center part) and you should get to another place in the control panel.
- try to move your mouse over the left section with the quick links.
- click the BACK <-   arrow and you are back to the starting point.
- if you try to point over the quick links on the left again, some of them make the cursor change shape to hand, some of them not!
- if you click on some of these that don't make the cursor transform to hand , you will experience the bug - you are just sent to another menu, which doesn't correspond to the name of what you clicked!!! Absolutely without any reason... You can click XXX menu and get sent to YYY submenu... unpredictable feature is something one must try to avoid as best as possible.
The others that make the hand appear work OK...


2. Connection timeout leads to memory leak.

If you are using LAN network to connect to the Internet and you connect to your provider via PPPoE, you can experience this problem.

If your provider is down, but you try to connect nevertheless, it tells you something like "provider is down, try reconnect in 90 seconds" and the countdown starts...
If you have clicked "Automatic reconnect" on your connection settings, than your OS will keep repeating this for as long as you have setup... and I have set up something like 1000 - how could I predict that something wrong could happen:

- After 30-60 minutes of non-stop redialing, if you check task manager and see resources , you will notice that the process, which manages the redialing is consuming almost 1.8 GB of RAM !!! And continues growing...
Later I saw that the OS became absolutely non-responsive and even the mouse couldn't move... I haven't seen a problem like this for a long time... when you close the process, you can continue with your work, but of course very disturbing... and many nerves were wasted until I found the reason behind this.

My Internet provider had such problems for 2 days straight and I experienced this three times! I am very certain this is the reason. And I have enough RAM - 3 GB is more than enough for Win 7- 1.0 GB is taken up at start up.

CONCLUSION
- I have disabled "Automatic reconnect"
- I don't use quick links on the left, because they don't work in Control Panel (could be so elsewhere too...)
- I have created two bug reports to Microsoft site - no response and I don't expect.

For everybody who wants to report a bug to Microsoft Windows, you can do so here:
http://mymfe.microsoft.com/Windows%207/Feedback.aspx?formID=195
(I've spent quite some time to find this link - use it! 30 minutes now and a few hours in the past)

http://blog.hznet.nl/2009/03/can-i-still-send-feedback-with-windows-7-rc/
try this link - I have not tried this but it could work

So report whatever you see so that Windows 7 is better.
This is valid for every other software that you use!

L.K.

No comments:

Post a Comment