Comment by qayxc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qayxc | Hacker News Reader

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> we didn't shutdown our machines in the evenings or weekends and they'd happily carry on running without apps crashing for over a year, often without air conditioning.

I really don't understand this. Apart from the minor detail that modern (e.g. younger than a decade or so) PCs can go to stand-by mode and wake up within seconds at most, I've yet to come across commodity hard- and software that doesn't do the same.

The current up time of my machine is 4 days 13 hours, 20 minutes - because I ran some system updates last week. Without those, even my mediocre machine running all the software I use on a daily basis (IDEs, web browser, several terminals) just keeps running for weeks on end and never ever crashes.

Am I just lucky or is this "crashes and blue screens"-business just a persistent memory from the late 90s and early 2000s?

There's a difference in weeks and years. I think the main reason was the OS and nearly all hardware was developed and tested by the same company - no 3rd party graphic card kernel drivers etc.

It was also a fact that a lot of these machines were expected to be up 24/7 - running mail/file servers etc. OS updates, including kernel updates wouldn't require rebooting.

Yes a kernel update would require rebooting. But that happened maybe once a year, or even less often. The update was delivered on tape and it was probably a multi-day project for the admins to prepare for the installation.

> Am I just lucky or is this "crashes and blue screens"-business just a persistent memory from the late 90s and early 2000s?

the choice of components determines if a windows machine bluescreenes all the time or accumulates uptime like a pro.

hard to make a informed choice thou because the market is moving very fast and so "luck" is a huge factor.

The current uptime on my PCs is always since the last power outage, currently 275 days. My laptop has been up for 40 days (with a lot of suspending.) I know Windows machines are forced to go down a lot, but I don't think other systems have that problem.

Everybody is required to go down a lot unless they're ignoring security patches. I see the Ubuntu "System restart required" message at least once a week.

If you wanted months of uptime in the early 1990s it had to be some kind of Unix - even Linux was not yet reliable enough.

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