Yeah, this story seems incredibly hyped up. The "check disk" utility (CHKDSK) has been worked over for Windows 7, which was badly needed. The old one had a low memory footprint, even when running it in "repair" mode to fix (logical) errors on a drive. This caused it to do a lot of seeking and generally stress the drive, and made it slow. With today's disks often being hundreds of gigabytes large, it could take hours or even days to run a repair operation. Microsoft quite sensibly decided that if a user has a faulty hard drive and wants to repair it, the user's likely priority is to get the repair done and over with, even at the expense of systems responsiveness and ability to run other apps during the process. They therefore designed it to be greedy and claim as much memory as possible, which of course is an open invitation to the likes of ZDNet reviewers to complain about "bloat". I can't help thinking of those people who install "ram boost" software that slows down their computers by making sure apps don't use all of the RAM you've bought... So, with this new design CHKDSK now doesn't speak directly to the hdd controller, but rather the installed driver. If I've understood correctly it was a bug in this driver, from a third party, that took the system down. I/O being fundamental, for an OS to be designed to shut down (hopefully with helpful information about the reason) if the system drive becomes unusuable seems sensible to me. But this apparently happens when running CHKDSK /r on non-primary drives. That's a bit odd to me. But few users ever run a CHKDSK /r and few of those who do have a buggy driver and fewer still will have a buggy driver by the time they've got Win7 and a disk that needs to be repaired. In short, the "show stopper" is probably a complete non-issue in market terms, even if it may cause grief for a small number of users for a limited time.
