Microsoft says Windows 7 bug no 'showstopper'

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Microsoft is asking everyone to calm down over reports of a 'showstopper' bug in its Windows 7 operating system.

The drama centres on the chkdsk.exe utility. Apparently, running it will "gobble" up memory and crash the system, according to one blog.

Windows head Steven Sinofsky stopped by that blog and - rather apologetically - posted a comment explaining the bug.

He said Microsoft has not been able to reproduce the crash and that one memory problem was discovered in the beta, which has since been fixed.

In fact, that chkdsk is using up a lot of memory is part of the design, explaining it does so to speed up the repair process.

"While we appreciate the drama of 'critical bug' and then the pickup of 'showstopper' that I’ve seen, we might take a step back and realise that this might not have that defcon level," he added.

"Bugs that are so severe as to require immediate patches and attention would have to have no workarounds and would generally be such that a large set of people would run across them in the normal course of using their PC," he said.

Click here for our review of Windows 7 RTM.

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