Windows' Sinofsky Personally Responds About the Win 7 RTM Bug, More Details

From DailyTech: There's a big new bug in Windows 7, a memory leak found in the Windows 7 RTM. While it takes a somewhat specific -- though not entirely uncommon -- sequence of commands to trigger, it can hog all the system's memory and reportedly has crashed some systems -- even producing, reportedly, the infamous blue screen of death.

First a followup on the bug. The bug is in the chkdsk.exe, a long standing Windows utility that allows you to check and repair your disks. In order to activate the bug you must run the utility and then choose the -R option from the command line or the "Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" on the GUI (not the default option). The bug only occurs when scanning secondary disks or partitions -- something a lot of users don't even have.

While this is a bit of a problem for system administrators, it now appears that the bug isn't as bad as was initially believed. Microsoft's newly appointed Windows President Steven Sinofsky took the unusual step of responding to one blog discussing the problem, Chris123NT. As Mr. Sinofsky points out, "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. 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."

This is definitely a valid point. There have been such bugs in past Windows OS's -- such as the Windows Home Server bug that corrupted data occasionally on a variety of normal reads and writes. However, this is a utility that most users rarely run, and requires the user to specially select the second option. Lastly, it appears that the severity of the bug varies -- on some computers it takes up only 90 percent of the memory, on others it crashes entirely.

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