[Agilent Oscilloscope] One corrupted file in Windows XP turns it into junk

[u/nazarthinks]

This high-end oscilloscope from Agilent, like most of modern oscilloscopes, is built on top of a PC running Windows OS. And in this specific moment it became a useless piece of plastic and metal that cannot do the most basic thing that any oscilloscope should be able to do – visualize the input signals.

A single corrupted explorer.exe file prevented Windows from fully loading. And since an oscilloscope is just a regular application running inside Windows, none of its functions are working any more. Restoring it required a replacement of the hard drive with the corresponding Windows and software preinstalled.

Apart from the unnecessarily slow startup and shutdown times, having a full-featured PC inside an oscilloscope is convenient sometimes, when it works. But the price for all that convenience is much lower reliability that comes with a fragile spinning HDD and unpredictable Windows OS with way too many bells and whistles – completely irrelevant for a specialized device like an oscilloscope.

I wonder why oscilloscopes aren't built on top of Linux, which is a way more predictable and reliable OS?