The Computer Corner

Buena Vista? Not likely
By Charles Miller


I have taken a little email flack from some Atención readers who disagreed with an early column in which I recommended not upgrading to the latest Windows Vista.

My recommendation was based largely on the fact that Windows Vista puts much more demand on computer hardware and as such is only going to perform at its best on the newest computers. Any new computer you buy from this point forward is likely to come with Windows Vista installed.

True to my prediction, some users who have tried to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista have encountered difficulties. I was not able to predict specific difficulties, but my past experience has been that something like this always comes up once a new Windows version is fielded.

What has been reported in recent weeks since Windows Vista went on sale is that users who have upgraded to Vista are experiencing the dreaded BSoD (the Blue Screen of Death).

The BSoD is what you see when your Windows desktop goes blue corner-to-corner leaving only a few lines of white-on-blue letters telling you that something bad has just happened and that Windows cannot continue. More often than not, this is indicative of a hardware problem.

Some people who have tried the upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista are discovering that a machine that ran XP fine will crash frequently with a BSoD once Vista is installed. The error code for the BSoD is usually the one that occurs when faulty Rapid Access Memory (RAM) is detected.

The “64 Thousand Dollar Question” is why would a computer that runs Windows XP without problems suddenly develop bad memory chips when Widows Vista is installed? What is different about the way memory is used by Vista, other than requiring a lot more of it?

The surprising answer is that Windows Vista is in fact using RAM in a completely different way than its predecessor Windows XP.

In an effort to improve computer security, Microsoft has implemented in Windows Vista a technology called “address space layout randomization.” This is not a new technology; BSD and some Linux distributions have used this for years. This is one reason these alternative operating systems have fewer problems with viruses and other security threats.

While “address space layout randomization” is incredibly complex in implementation, the theory behind it is pretty easy to understand. Each time Windows Vista boots, it randomly loads its code into different segments of memory. This makes it really difficult for a virus or an attacker to predict where in your computer’s memory Windows is loaded. If the attacker cannot find what it is looking for in memory, it cannot infect it. This pre-emptive defense works well against common exploits such as buffer overruns.

The bottom line is that some computers that ran Windows XP without a problem will crash under Vista. The defective RAM that might have caused only the random crash or application fault under XP will not run Vista at all.


This should not have come as a surprise to Microsoft because to a lesser degree the same thing happened six years ago when XP was first released.

Then, as now, the answer was that if you wanted to run the newest version of Microsoft Windows, you ought to buy a new computer to go with it.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044-415-101-8528 or email FAQ@SMAguru.com.