Despite all the talk that keeps going around, I have found that XP has been very stable for me over the last several years. I don’t remember ever having a BSOD (Blue Scr… uh, nevermind) and even in the worst case I have been able to kill all bad processes and or retain enough control to do a soft restart.

However there is one thing that drives me nuts about PC hardware - disk drive access. From floppys to DVDs something causes the computer to annoyingly wait on these peripheral devices as if they ran machine. A problem that probably has reached into the Linux and Mac world now that we all are using the same parts.

The problem is usually caused by faulty media not allowing access requests or  returning blank/invalid sectors. You know that really old (5yrs) music CD you had? Now you can use it to crash your computer anytime you want! Oh joy!

I just don’t get it, why should the any Operating System lock up and “wait” for the CD/DVD/Floppy to send back a response on it’s state? Why can’t it just quietly post a request in the background instead of somehow tying up my Quad Core system? If you can’t access it then just have the drive keep trying and the OS can go on to other things while it waits.