Inexplicable errors

At Larry Seltzer's September 6th eWeek column, he talks about "(when) strange, inexplicable things happen on your Windows computer",

My first reaction was "yes, Windows". I don't have a lot of strange or inexplicable things happen on my Mac. Larry goes on to point out that nowadays most people assume they have a virus or spyware infection, but in fact, it just may be the crappy (my sentiment, not Larry's) way that Windows is designed. As Larry explains, Windows XP is mostly single threaded, which is a problem in and of itself, but he also hints at a larger problem: if you know you are writing a single threaded program, one would think you'd work harder to give some feedback to the user or at least write some log entries now and then. But no, that wouldn't be "user friendly", would it? And how many Windows users even know that there are logs?

Just another of the many, many reasons why I'll take a Mac or Linux box over Windows any day.

But.. if you have to mess with this junk, and I guess most of us do now and then, two utiliies referenced by that column are definitely worth having (and they are free, so your only cost is downloading them):

• Filemon which monitors and displays file system activity
• Regmon which can watch registry accesses in real time

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