scott wrote:
>> There's something fundamentally wrong with your OS architecture when 
>> copying a directory full of files from one drive to another makes your 
>> hardware-accelerated mouse cursor so jittery it's literally unusable.
> 
> What annoys me is when you put in a CD or DVD that is a bit scratched, 
> then it makes any program that is trying to access the drive (windows 
> explorer, CD burner etc) grind to a complete halt until the hardware has 
> recognised the disc.

Yeah. There are lots of OSes that assume disk access is fast enough you 
can block while it goes on. (Indeed, I think I saw in the release notes 
that they just fixed this in the latest Linux kernel, letting you now 
kill a process waiting on disk access, but it's been like that in UNIX 
since before V7.)

The *real* killer is when things not accessing that disk get locked up. 
I can see it if Explorer for example gets stuck waiting for a disk read 
to return, but something running elsewhere (like your database server) 
without accessing that drive shouldn't wait. I'm honestly not sure how 
much Windows locks things up if you're not accessing that drive. I know 
that heavy I/O (like, say, defragging a disk) can make Windows pretty 
unusable until it finishes, blocking paging and such.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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