While it was bound to happen and therefore no surprise I started seeing the headlines blasting across the blogosphere about some bug some-one had found that they yelled to all who would hear that this was a show-stopper for a Windows 7 launch. One of the more firebrand posts that showed up to celebrate this great occasion came from Randall C. Kennedy at Infoworld where he wrote

Oh boy! It appears that Microsoft’s glowing track record with Windows 7 is about to come to an abrupt and unceremonious end. According to various Web sources, the RTM build 7600.16385 includes a potentially fatal bug that, once triggered, could bring down the entire OS in a matter of seconds.

The bug in question — a massive memory leak involving the chkdsk.exe utility — appears when you attempt to run the program against a secondary (that is, not the boot partition) hard disk using the "/r" (read and verify all file data) parameter. The problem affects both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 and is classified as a "showstopper" in that it can cause the OS to crash (Blue Screen of Death) as it runs out of physical memory.

Hmm .. that sounds pretty scary huh. I guess this means that Microsoft is going to postpone the launch immediately because of this horrendous bug.

Then along come Ed Bott and a more reasonable and level-headed look at what everyone was saying would be the beginning of the end for Windows 7 and Microsoft. After some pretty exhaustive testing Ed wrote this on his ZDNet blog

Let’s all take a deep breath, shall we? I’ve done a couple hours worth of testing this morning on the subject. There’s much less here than meets the eye. The idea that this bug is reproducible 100% of the time is incorrect, and in fact some of the seemingly alarming behavior is actually by design.

First, you won’t see this bug on your system drive. Why? Because if you try to run Chkdsk with this switch (either from the command line or from the graphical interface) you’ll be told that the drive is in use. Windows will politely offer to schedule the disk check to run the next time you reboot and before Windows loads. The disk check in this mode is quick and harmless.

There’s more but that is the gist of it. In other words – Chill. Out. Not to mention how about dialing back on the rhetoric and other stupid things that are being posted. The idea that this was a reason for delaying the launch of the best operating system put out by Microsoft in years is a stupid as calling what everyone was yammering about a show-stopping bug.

This sanity check obviously hasn’t help at all because we are still seeing the bullshit rolling through the blogosphere.

 

Sorry but this isn’t a killer bug that is going to delay the release of Windows 7 but I am sure that such polemics was great for pageviews – which is about all that the ridiculousness is worth.