After realizing just how much more functional the more recent versions
of WinDbg are compared to SoftIce, I went through the effort of setting
up WinDbg in my environment a few weeks ago in order to evaluate it.
It’s great in many ways, but WinDbg’s fatal flaw is its speed. The speed
is simply not acceptable over a null-modem connection (even at 57600
baud). I am typically stepping over pages of code per minute while
debugging, and WinDbg seems to take a large fraction of a second or so
to single-step a single line, even with most of the windows closed.
Now I know the FireWire interface is available (if only for XP), but
before I go out and buy two FireWire cards I want to know if this will
bring WinDbg up to an appropriate level of speed. I certainly would love
to get rid of SoftIce and all its bugs (if you’re reading this
Compuware, thanks for breaking the ERESOURCE command in v2.7).
- Nicholas Ryan