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by jeroenhd 44 days ago
Windows will throw up warnings when the disk space is nearly empty, when it detects driver instability, when RAM is full and page files can't keep up, when a specific application is draining your battery, when your files aren't backing up right, and all other kinds.

The problem with most of those is that either users don't care until it's too late ("I need to get this done now, I'll delete files later"), third party applications are the cause and Windows can't/shouldn't interfere (did a program memory leak or is the user pushing the boundaries of what the system can handle?), or because there's not much the user can do about it ("your GPU driver crashed", well gee, my drivers are up to date, let me spend half a month's wages on a new GPU then, shall we?).

The only "too late" errors I've seen on Windows are when something very important has crashed and the system needs to shut down for data integrity (crss.exe crashing on school computers comes to mind, though I doubt that was the fault of Microsoft), or when something unpredictable went wrong, like a file ending up corrupt because of a failing hard drive or flipped bit in memory.

Microsoft actually created a dedicated screen to monitor errors and failures of all kinds (https://www.elevenforum.com/t/view-reliability-history-in-wi...) that's been around since Vista. It used to open up automatically if you clicked a popup after certain errors, but it appears Microsoft eventually stopped doing that. Going by how many "today I learned" posts I find when I look up the feature, I'm guessing nobody who actually understands what the screen does ever used the feature.

1 comments

> when RAM is full and page files can't keep up

reality: kills dwm.exe (not the game that's the culprit and was running in borderless mode)

Windows does not kill system processes like that the way Linux does. It doesn't even have a real OOM killer, it just keeps allocating more and more page file until there's no more page file to allocate, no more pages to compress, no more working sets and other caches to clear, and then finally gives up when you try to allocate RAM. If DWM.exe crashes and you have even a small amount of storage space or RAM, something else is going on.

Given how DWM and video games both hit the GPU pretty hard, the death of DWM.exe can be anything from memory exhaustion to (GPU driver) bugs.