[Scribus] [OT] Windows instability/drivers
Craig Ringer
craig
Mon Mar 27 07:35:15 CEST 2006
hovergo at net-tech.com.au wrote:
> Scribus crashing in windows off topic
Hi. Thanks for trimming the digest instead of quoting the lot. It'd be
good if you could change the subject too when replying to a digest, so
people can see at a glance what you're asking about.
>> That really changed when the NT-based OSes (NT, 2k, XP) went mainstream.
>> These days it's ASDOA - Always Suspect Drivers Or Applications.
>> Especially drivers. If you get a bluescreen (STOP error), the chances
>> are VERY strong that it's a driver, or flakey hardware like an
>> overheating CPU or video card. Program crashes are likely to be just
>> that, though they can certainly be caused by things like old/flakey
>> video drivers, particularly broken spyware, etc.
>>
>>
> I would like to know more about this and where to get less suspect
> drivers, and what drivers to look for.
> We have several machines some very new from Dell some 3 years old range
> from Dell to generic shop built, none have any problem on Linux.
You may have better luck clean-installing the machines with a "vanilla"
copy of WinXP, then hunting down drivers from the chipset manufacturers
or using the drivers from Microsoft Windows Update. Usually you can get
most drivers from Windows Update, then pull down a few critical ones
(like the ATi Catalyst, Intel Extreme Graphics, or NVidia Detonator GPU
drivers) from vendor websites.
While you'd expect drivers from the big OEMs to be stable and well
tested, they don't seem to be as good as you'd expect. More importantly,
they tend to be OLD ... and that's a real problem when running some new
apps that are very demanding and rely on features that were buggy in
older versions of a driver.
Avoid using the drivers supplied by hardware vendors on the CD that
comes with the hardware. Let Windows fetch a driver, or failing that get
one from the company that made the underlying part rather than the
vendor whose name is on the box. They're usually more up-to-date and
haven't been butchered. Graphics drivers are a CLASSIC case for this.
Of course, you also need to ensure you have suitable anti-spyware and
anti-virus software. Beware, though - some antispyware, antivirus and
firewall software is worse than the problems it claims to prevent. I use
Grisoft's AVG, the XP SP2 built-in firewall and LavaSoft Ad-Aware on all
Windows machines (work & home) without issues. By contrast I've found
recent versions of Norton cause more problems than the viruses and 'net
attacks they're supposed to prevent.
This is all just my personal experience of course, and YYMV.
Hey, this is even kinda-on-topic now Scribus runs on win32 ;-)
> On the last Newsletter I edited and designed, in changing over to
> Scribus I actually saved 200 hours icluding learning Scribus from scratch.
> I'm a volunteer and give my time to the newsletter, so saving 2-3 weeks
> was wonderful.
That's pretty cool, and it's nice to hear things like it. When working
on Scribus I tend to see rather more of the broken bits than the bits
that work smoothly, so it's easy to lose sight of what can be done with
it and related applications. Thanks.
--
Craig Ringer
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