Today I encountered some hardware problems - Vdd voltage stayed at too low level (my motherboard is old (EPOX 8RDA+) and such things happen from time to time). But it’s not the hardware what I want to write about…

I’ve noticed that in a very unstable environment Linux (2.6, Slackware) performs far better than Windows XP. I tried to boot Windows several times - for nothing. Even if it succeeded a last, the system was going to hung up about 5 sec after boot-up. All I could see were the famous BSOD’s PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA or DRIVER_IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Then I tried my Linux installation - it booted without any problems. I started X and everything went as usual. I tried starting X for a few times and only once it didn’t start, but it was no problem at all - another startx and everything was fine. I could use my apps without any disturbance.

Later, after I managed to partially solve problems with hardware, Windows started as well, but still I’m not able to play any game, because everthing more power-consuming causes system to hang. In Linux I can do what I want - browse the Web, watch movies, I will also try compiling something. Of course I must solve this hardware issue somehow (maybe a Vdd mod?), but now I can use my PC normally, which wouldn’t be so easy with Windows.

This made me think more about the stability of these two OS, so possibly I will do more experiments on this issue… It is my first post but expect more on topics related to “Windows vs Linux”.