Windows 7 freezeup bug
People hated Vista, and there seems to be a warm feeling, in the press at least, for Windows 7. I have had a week with Windows 7, and I am about ready to go back to Windows Vista, at least until Microsoft fixes the issues. Vista was mature, and stable, far more so than XP. The biggest complaint I heard about Vista, being a memory hog, was really a feature. Vista loaded everything into RAM, and kept everything that had been used loaded until there was no more space. Were it not for a major hardware failure, I would still be running Vista, but an untimely death forced me to get a new machine.
While Windows 7 does not perform particularly poorly when running programs, it is full of niggling little issues that irritate particular people like myself. The issue that has me about ready to close the book on it for a while (and let other people beta test for Microsoft) is the freezeup issue. I have turned every power management setting off, but when I have left the machine idle for a while, when I go back to use it, the screen comes back right away, and the mouse will move a few times, but if you click on anything the whole system freezes solid.
However, this freezeup is only temporary. The disk activity light indicates that something is being read from the disk, and while that is underway, all other activity ceases. A properly designed multi-tasking system should never lock up like that, especially for several minutes. Initially I thought the only escape from the freezeup was a shut-down, but the problem seems to go away on its own accord when it is good and ready, when whatever it was working on finishes.
I have no idea whether there are some options I am using that are causing this, but I have ruled out antivirus software because none of the two packages I have tried, or bareback, has made any difference. Something is being done during long idle times that does not readily cease. However, a freezeup is inexcusable, and indicative of the typical shallowness of testing that is put into Microsoft’s premier product.