[ubuntu-in] Big Mystery. (Also need help)

[Vishal Rao]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 4:25 PM, Prateek Sharma <prateek3.14 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know its a hardware fault etc, and that u really cant do much about
> it. But if windows can run, why cant Linux? How is windows able to
> side-step the bad areas to run OK? Atleast the windows kernel runs
> fine. I dont have to do reboots etc. Heck, i can even play games
> smoothly on windows.  Please Help!

I remember many years ago of people on the Internet with the same
story. The thing back then is that Linux+GCC "stress" and utilise RAM
much more "efficiently" thereby almost always touching all bits and
triggering the problem. I'm guessing you have Windows XP and if you
tried Vista you might get the same problem due to things like ASLR
(Address Space Layout Randomisation) and what not.

Ah, just Googled and found this link:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/faqs/GCC-SIG11-FAQ

Snippet from the link:

"  QUESTION

   Nothing crashes on NT, Windows 95, OS/2 or DOS. It must be something
   Linux specific.

  ANSWER

   First of all, Linux stresses your hardware more than all of the above.
   Some OSes like the Microsoft ones named above crash in unpredictable
   ways anyway. Nobody is going to call Microsoft and say "hey, my
   windows box crashed today". If you do anyway, they will tell you that
   you, the user, made an error (see the interview with Bill Gates in a
   German magazine....) and that since it works now, you should shut up.
   Those OSes are also somewhat more "predictable" than Linux. This means
   that Excel might always be loaded in the exact same memory area.
   Therefore when the bit-error occurs, it is always excel that gets it.
   Excel will crash. Or excel will crash another application. Anyway, it
   will seem to be a single application that fails, and not related to
   memory.
   What I am sure of is that a cleanly installed Linux system should be
   able to compile the kernel without any errors. Certainly no sig-11
   ones. (** Exception: Red Hat 5.0 with a Cyrix processor. See
   elsewhere. **)
   Really Linux and gcc stress your hardware more than other OSes. If you
   need a non-linux thingy that stresses your hardware to the point of
   crashing, you can try winstone. -- Jonathan Bright
   (bright at informix.com)"