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Bill Gates : 5 % Of Windows Machines Crash More Than Twice A Day | |
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| Time: 11:54 EST/16:54 GMT | News Source: E-Mail | Posted By: Brian Kvalheim | ||
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The New York Times has published an interesting write up of Microsoft's annual financial analyst meeting. We were considering a general-interest reference article to the Times' coverage until we noted one specifically interesting tidbit concerning Microsoft's own estimation of Windows' robustness. According to the article, Mr. Gates says that 5% of all Windows installations crash more than twice a day. From the NY Times: Mr. Gates acknowledged today that the company's error reporting service indicated that 5 percent of all Windows-based computers now crash more than twice each day. | ||
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| #1 By 1896 (66.20.202.235) at 7/25/2003 12:19:06 PM |
| Maybe trying to make the OS working with most of the hardware available on the market? Apple does not have to support every kind of hardware combinations, just and only the one they built their system with. It is a huge difference, isn' t it? |
| #2 By 7754 (216.160.8.41) at 7/25/2003 12:28:56 PM |
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That's true, Fritzly, but I don't think Microsoft gives themselves that excuse.
I wonder, though, if these were soft or hard crashes, and what versions of Windows were included (error reporting seems to suggest XP alone, but 5% seems far, far too high to me). |
| #3 By 8016 (195.92.67.71) at 7/25/2003 12:48:03 PM |
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Most crashes in Windows are from non-MS software/hardware drivers.
#5, Only Windows XP (don't know about Windows 2003 Server) has an error reporting service, doesn't it? |
| #4 By 1169 (212.38.182.251) at 7/25/2003 1:21:10 PM |
| I get many crashes from IE which have nothing to do with non-MS software, XP is still crashy, it crashes on my system, at least once in oen of the 10 computers at the office, on my mom's system, and most of these crashes are from IE (not just the browser engine but when browsing a hard drive or such, or even when changing MS own screesavers), I would say there is a problem still with robustness and XP |
| #5 By 135 (209.180.28.6) at 7/25/2003 1:24:20 PM |
| I had a Windows 2003 install go belly up yesterday. Won't boot, claims registry file is corrupt. First time I've ever seen that. My worry, though, is the hardware is going bad. :( |
| #6 By 11888 (64.230.66.108) at 7/25/2003 2:45:52 PM |
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Okay, I think I've got the process figured out here:
(1) Someone claims that Windows crashes (2) Refute claim citing that the current version of Windows is more stable that all previous versions and everyone should be using it instead. (3) Back to 1. And then Microsoft laughs at us all for buying the latest version because really the *next* version is going to be the one that is rock-solid. Anyone see that article about the TRON OS? Maybe we can switch to that. http://edition.cnn.com/2003/BUSINESS/07/16/japan.tron.reut/index.html |
| #7 By 7754 (216.160.8.41) at 7/25/2003 2:57:34 PM |
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Sodablue--I had the same thing happen to me this past week, but the problem turned out to be a bad install CD!
I also had problems with both XP and 2003 on the same hardware (desktop white box for testing purposes)--nothing big, just that the machine won't recover from standby mode. It could be a driver (not all are certified), but I think it's the motherboard. It's probably not on the HCL--I didn't check, but no matter. I don't need standby mode for this box anyhow! :) Otherwise both systems run like a top on that machine. 2003 really screams! Also, I think we should clarify here what "crashing" means to us. Is it a software crash, like when explorer.exe locks up? I've had this happen every once in awhile with XP, but it will recover from it. Sometimes, though, it's simply faster to reboot (especially on the newer machines!!) rather than to wait for it, but if you need to save your work you can still do it. I wish that Microsoft's error reporting would focus also on these errors, since they make up nearly all the errors that I encounter--not hard crashes, but soft crashes. Diabulos, et. al--if you guys are getting true hard crashes, you should check your hardware and drivers. Explorer.exe locking up when browsing a hard drive is another matter--still an important one--but not a "Windows crash." It's a "soft crash," at best. |
| #8 By 7754 (216.160.8.41) at 7/25/2003 3:11:14 PM |
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Fine, MrRoper, if we want to do the rest of our computing on digital watches.... :)
You notice an important trend--that is, we are quick to discount reliability claims made against "Windows" when that "Windows" is 95/98/ME. Everyone realizes those OSes weren't very resistant to crashing, even Microsoft admits that. Trying to draw attention to that fact is like trying to tell people the sun is bright. No kidding! No need for repeating that claim ad nauseam, but yet it is... even by people who should (and most often do) know better. So yes, we are quick to question what they mean by "Windows" when talking about reliability. Protected memory, hardware abstraction, certified drivers, NTFS... all that stuff means something. |
| #9 By 20 (67.9.179.51) at 7/25/2003 3:58:00 PM |
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As far as certification and run-time driver checking...
Have you installed any drivers where XP warns you that it hasn't been certified? If so, then how can you blame MS for anything? It's obviously the driver. 100% of my crashes in the last 2 years are directly attributed to nVidia drivers. I'm not saying nVidia is bad, the crashes are far and few between, but it's certainly not Windows. As far as run-time checking, that's nearly impossible because drivers no only have direct access to memory, they also have direct hardware access. So even if you figure out some way to control all drivers' access to memory and check it for problems, you can't protect the driver from locking up the hardware or corrupting the bus. It's impossible without changes to hardware and major changes to the Windows Driver Development Kit which will cause a huge change to all drivers and would be a major effort in time and cost. |
| #10 By 61 (24.92.223.112) at 7/25/2003 4:49:38 PM |
| ABL, bluescreens do produce error reporting messages upon reboot when it is a componant of Windows that caused the system to blue screen. |
| #11 By 7754 (216.160.8.41) at 7/25/2003 5:37:20 PM |
| Mr. Dee, if you haven't already, change your appearance settings to make it look like 2000--you will notice an increase in responsiveness. If you don't believe me, check out an eval of Windows Server 2003--it's very, very responsive out of the box. However, if you enable "themes" on it and set the GUI to Windows XP style, you'll notice it slows down a little bit. |
| #12 By 61 (24.92.223.112) at 7/25/2003 9:51:27 PM |
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Bryan: Well, 2000, and subsequently XP, both reduced the amount of rebooting you had to do for various tasks.
bluvg: it's not just the theming... I'd say most of the slowed performance is mental... Win2k3 is so snappy mostly because they cut out a lot of legacy garbage. |
| #13 By 135 (208.186.90.91) at 7/26/2003 1:56:21 PM |
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bluvg - "I had the same thing happen to me this past week, but the problem turned out to be a bad install CD! "
Well this was an install I've had in place for a good six months. It started complaining about RPC failures and other things, and in the process of trying to figure out why that was happening, I did a reboot... At which point it failed to come up. Ok, so I installed Windows 2003 to a new directory to bring the machine back up and look at it. Did a check disk, tried to restore a copy of the registry hive, etc. Not much luck. Then I look at the Event log and there's a message: "The driver has detected that harddrive0 is predicted to fail. Backup your data and replace the drive." That's what I was afraid of! :) I think that's amazing how the drive didn't completely fail, but just started to slowly die. Anyway, it's pretty rare these days to see Win2k, XP, or 2003 crash. Generally it's been hardware failures for me. I have on occasion had some other difficulties with performance. Mr. Dee - Look for an article in the KB about ctfmon.exe. I've found that's the culprit of performance and bogging under XP. Let me know if you want more info. |
| #14 By 2960 (68.100.231.92) at 7/27/2003 11:43:22 AM |
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ALL OS's crash, whether it be Windows XP, Linux, MacOS 9, MacOS X, BeOS, it doesn't matter. They ALL crash.
However since Windows 2000/XP (and MacOS X) came out it sure is a less likely problem. I firmly believe that is because of the (not perfect, but helpful) system file protection incorporated into these OS's. In the old days of Windows 9x, any application could replace any system file it wanted with it's own version. That was a nightmare. I also think that most crashes these days are application based or driver based, and that applies to all platforms, not just Windows. The only real Windows 2K/XP crash that literally drives me up the wall (because it's so rarely fixable without a re-image), is the dreaded "Stop: Innaccessible Boot Device" error. I am still not a fan of the Windows 'registry' system. I personally think that engineering all the eggs into one basket was a terrible design idea. TL |
| #15 By 9589 (66.57.63.97) at 7/27/2003 1:37:21 PM |
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Our database cluster systems are running W2K AS and SQL2K and have been running since last August without a reboot. We took them down to upgrade the memory, the system hard drives, the NICs to teaming and 1GBs and reconfigure the shared database disks for RAID 10. They handle an average of several hundred transactions a second.
We've been running Windows 2003 Web Edition and IIS 6.0 in a NLB cluster configuration since mid June with no reboots. They are handling millions of hits a day. While we can't say they have the stability we are seeing on the database servers yet, we are pleased with their performance nevertheless. The biggest reason for taking down our several hundred servers these days is NOT the Microsoft OS that is running on them, but some hardware problem (hard drives are at the top of the list, then system boards and then memory chips (rarely)) or an update to a hardware area to increase their lives there by putting off having to buy more robust servers. |
| #16 By 8016 (195.92.67.68) at 7/28/2003 5:16:14 AM |
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#10 I sometimes have IE crash too (when clicking a link) almost everytime after Opera 7 crashes IE just locks after clicking a link but as soon as I open Task Manager and kill the opera process IE unlocks and works fine. which goes back to it's most often non-MS stuff in the background making the problems. This post was edited by jamescarey on Monday, July 28, 2003 at 05:17. |
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