I really like the part on detection of hardware failure to guide users on a computer maintenance page.
Computer enthusiast, which are many amongst gamer, are just very eager of this kind of information, discovering it by a game you like that tells you 'check or do that to have a better gaming experience' must be a wonderful and exciting experience.
One idea that struck me: given the classical role of the operating system, doesn't this sound like something an OS should be able to provide?
I imagine an OS service that, if requested, sits in the background and does what that game code did, in order to detect those kinds of errors. Does any OS have this? It really seems semi-obvious, now ...
Indeed. Having personally experienced power supply issues a few times (either due to malfunction or the mentioned problem of super-hungry GPU) and the resulting random crashes, I would have been greatly helped by this kind of detection in the OS.
It seems that in the PC world there is very little functionality in place to detect, isolate, and nail down hardware issues. Or if it exist somewhere deep in the firmware, at least no standardized way to access it.
On the positive side, I was recently very surprised when Linux started to give errors about a certain CPU core after programs started hanging. Somehow one of my cores had failed without crashing the OS(!). After disabling that core in the BIOS with the next reboot the issues went away.
So there is some level of hardware problem detection and robustness in modern OSes, but maybe not enough.
While I also agree that it's a great idea, the challenge is that it's a complex system of hardware components. An error in one component won't necessarily show up directly associated with the component generating the error.
A simple mem test like the article discussed is a nice test, but what if the comparison tables are corrupted? Then it would falsely claim the memory was bad, when it might be the network interface, hard drive, or bus!
Computer enthusiast, which are many amongst gamer, are just very eager of this kind of information, discovering it by a game you like that tells you 'check or do that to have a better gaming experience' must be a wonderful and exciting experience.