• I think it would be a waste of time and resources to port Windows to other chipsets but, more importantly, it would probably lead to a "dumbing down" of the underlying OS code to the lowest common denominator.

    For example, one of the core reasons that Windows crashes is poorly written device drivers etc. that have to run in kernel mode and can therefore clobber the kernel memory space (this is why MS introduced the device driver signing programme - to avoid other people's poorly written code bringing down Windows and making everyone believe that Windows itself is unstable). There is a way to completely avoid this on x86/x64 architectures by making all device drivers and other non-OS code run in a different processor mode. So then you would have the OS in one mode, device drivers etc. in another and, lastly, user programs in yet another.

    This would likely eliminate the dreaded "blue screen of death" once and for all.

    So why isn't this the case? Because the Alpha chip only had two processor modes.

    So, we still have to put up with crashes that could otherwise be seamlessly handled because of the need to support a now defunct processor architecture.

    No, I think this kind of thing ends up impoverishing or overcomplicating the OS.

    Malcolm
    DB Ghost - Build, compare and synchronize from source control = Database Change Management for SQL Server
    www.dbghost.com