Restart Time Matters

This morning, after a 6-7am meeting, my work laptop PC hung up. Restarting it highlights another performance issue.

The original hang was not bad, but annoying. The Nvidia nView Desktop Manager, that I use to change my screen settings - e.g. to go into and out of reduced resolution, so that the folks in Israel could see my slides - left a "turd" on my screen. A "just wait" box was thrown up, and stayed around for 15 minutes, after all Nvidia tool was closed down, after I left to do something else for a while. Past experience has shown that occasionally just waiting a few minutes leads to such turds being cleaned up - but not this time.

(I suspect that I could have killed rundll32.exe from the process (not task) manager, but I am always nervous about killing processes that I do not know exactly what they do. Especially sometrhing like rundll32.exe, that gets used by may facilities.)

I could have left this turd around and kept going. But it is annoying to have a small rectangular area on your screen that won't redraw. So I decided to restart my PC, in the hopes that (a) that would clean up the turd, and (b) I could go and have breakfast while waiting for the restart.

So, I hit restart. Waited a bit. Walked away.

After my beans and tomatos on toast (there, that proves I'm a Brit, even if my accent is more American than Canadian after 24 years in the US), I went back to check. I expected that I might have to type in my hard disk password (for PGP Full Disk Encryption).

But, surprise! Actually, no surprise, just disappointment. Windows' restart had hung, waiting for me to say "OK" to killing some application. There was a flurry of such kill dialog boxes, some with timeouts, but enough without timeouts that I had to sit and wait. The rundll32.exe that I suspect was used by Nvidia, that I suspect was causing the problem, was one of them.

OK, answer all of these dialog boxes. Now, surely, I can walk away...

Nope. Come back another 15 minutes later, to see a blank screen. Not dead - when I moved the mouse, and typed ctl-alt-del, suddenly things started proceeding to shutdown again. But, it certainly was hung waiting for something to be rejiggered or unblocked.

Finally, it reboots. Watch the reboot. Type in the PGP full disk encryption password.

What a loss! What a lost opportunity! If I could have overlapped the reboot with eating breakfast, I would have had half an hour more for work.

MORAL: even the time to resatrt matters. Automation, to allow a completely automatic reboot without having to type in passwords, or anticipation - having the reboot subsystem ask, in advance "Do you want to end all processes that aren't responsive", rather than waiting to ask me about them one by one. Automation and anticipation, even of something like the reboot process, would be a good thing.

At work we often say things like "Surely people don't care about the speed of rebooting after a Machine Check". Wrong! Maybe we don't care about is as *much* as we care about normal operation. But the performance (and automation) of anything we do a lot matters. And, on Wintel PCs, rebooting happens quite a lot.

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There may be another moral here. I like the idea of microrebooting. Perhaps I couold microreboot the display manager, and/or otherwise tell the display manager that the non-responsive process's window should not be redrawn.