Microsoft plays down Windows 7 "showstopper drama"

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 6 Aug 2009 at 08:50

Microsoft's Windows supremo Steven Sinofsky has quashed rumours that Windows 7 was prone to a "showstopping" bug that would have delayed rollout.

Stories had been sweeping the internet that using the chkdsk.exe utility on a second hard disk would lead to a massive memory leak, bringing the operating system to its knees in seconds.

Perhaps wary of any negative publicity affecting the Windows 7 launch, the OS's chief engineer responded to the report on an enthusiast site. Microsoft has confirmed the comments are those of Sinofsky.

"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 realise that this might not have that defcon level," Sinofsky responded.

"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."

Needless to say, according to Sinosfky, this hasn't happened. Instead he blamed the overload on a specific chip-set controller error. He went on to say that Microsoft would continue to watch for issues with Windows 7, but claimed "so far this is not one of those issues."