This article is more than 1 year old

Microsoft gets personal on Windows 7 "show stopper" bug

Memory leak smack down

Microsoft has gotten personal in responding to reports of a "show stopper" bug in Windows 7 capable of delaying the planned roll-out, which starts Thursday.

The company has blamed a chip-set controller issue rather than a critical bug in the Windows 7 chkdsk /r tool that could cause a memory leak capable of causing your PC to seize up and crash.

Windows 7 customers have been advised to update their chipset drivers to the current driver supplied by their motherboard manufacturer.

That came after Steven Sinofsky, the president of Microsoft's Windows division, took on those who had used blogs and online forums to jump on Windows 7 and the Microsoft development and testing process.

Sinofsky said Microsoft hadn't reproduced the crash or experienced any crashes with chkdsk on the stack reported in "any measurable number."

He appeared to take particular issue, however, with descriptions of a "critical bug" and "showstopper" in Windows 7, of bugs being "out of place" and comments Windows 7 would have to be delayed. The code is to be released to MSDN and TechNet subscribers Thursday and OEMs a few days later, with the official launch planned for October 22.

"While we appreciate the drama of 'critical bug' and then the pickup of 'showstopper' that I’ve seen, we might take a step back and realize that this might not have that defcon level," he said.

"Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC."

Sinofsky said Microsoft would continue to look for, monitor, and address issues as they arise if required but: "So far this is not one of those issues." ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like