Vista Users: How has stability been? | The Coffeehouse

Same old story of drivers determining stability and thereby reflecting (in users minds) the stability of Windows as a whole.

typemismatch

When I ran Vista for 3 months I had other issues and can't remember how stable the actual OS was.

Here is the problem, I'm on XP 32Bit - at least once a week if not more an application goes nuts and the machine basically grinds to a halt. I try restart/shutdown/whatever and it just hangs at the shutting down or logging off screen and you have to kill the power. I'm sure we're all been there.

Besides Vista's obvious issues - in this single issue, does it seem to cope?

thanks

tgraupmann

I'm up to 173 problems in the Problem Reports and Solutions. Is this like game achievement points. It would be cool to be able to buy stuff with these!

tgraupmann

My experience is a little bit like this (Vista Ultimate 64-bit):

[img]http://www.tagenigma.com/geeklog/images/articles/20071021230023804_5.JPG[/img[

I can't wait for Vista SP1!

Sven Groot

Vista is rock-solid on both my machines, one running x64 and the other x86. I've not had any BSODs and I've also never had the problem you describe, athough to be honest I've never had that on XP either.

EDIT: tgraupman, that looks like a driver problem.

EDIT2: I think the last time I've ever seen a BSOD that wasn't caused by a hardware failure on one of my own machines was in Windows XP Beta 2.

dahat

I've had Vista running on 3 machines since very early in the year and with x86 on my desktop and tablet and my MCE with x64... and the only problems I have had have been driver or memory related... 2 gigs of ram is just not enough for my desktop anymore.

When it comes to drivers the audio driver for my nforce4 mobo are %&(@ poor (and sometimes require restarting of the audio service) and the tablet occasionally has some wireless issues (monthly).

JChung2006

Vista has been stable for me. I have had one BSOD, and it was because of a bad memory chip.

tgraupmann

Sven Groot wrote:

EDIT: tgraupman, that looks like a driver problem.

Why doesn't Vista disable a driver that results in a BSOD? Or at least tell you which one caused the BSOD...

AndyC

tgraupmann wrote:

Why doesn't Vista disable a driver that results in a BSOD? Or at least tell you which one caused the BSOD...

Because it's an incredibly hard problem to solve. Consider the case when Driver A has a butter overrun which corrupts memory used by Driver B. The machine may crash in Driver B, but updating that isn't going to fix the issue.

That said, the results from the online crash dump analysis that Vista does often manages to identify the culprit, so it's well worth sending error reports if the machine is blue screening a lot.

Sven Groot

AndyC wrote:

butter overrun

That sounds like an interesting problem to have. Tongue Out

AndyC

Sven Groot wrote:

AndyC wrote: butter overrun

That sounds like an interesting problem to have.

The handwriting recognition still needs work. Smiley

mcampbell

Having lot's of peformance issuses. Just BSOD'd twice the other day.

keeron

Stable, reliable, a little slow at times (but blame the user for that*)

Ran the RC2 build for a long time (until the last day it was officially allowed all over the world Smiley ), ran RTM build for few months and now in SP1 (private beta).

It's been pretty stable. Had some issues with sleep/hibernation earlier with my ThinkPad T60, but after I dumped my docking station, it's been good. performance is slow (* above), but that's mainly due to me running a ton of things. This is my dev machine, so I have VS, outlook, sidebar gadgets, AV, IE windows, perforce source control, couple of explorer windows, media player, etc all open at once. But it's not as bad as I saw XP behave (over-time).

One think I hope they fix in SP1 is the unneccessary usage of disk space (temp install files, left over stuff from WU or installs, system restores, etc).

Edit: oh and to add to others here, I also haven't seen any BSODs yet (even driver related, since most of my drivers were either already on disk or WU found them).

Yggdrasil

keeron wrote:

Had some issues with sleep/hibernation earlier with my ThinkPad T60, but after I dumped my docking station, it's been good

So you're saying Vista doesn't fix that?
I'm using a T60 as well, and beyond being frustrated with the ridiculous 1024x768 resolution, I've also had a lot of problems when resuming from Standby, and they mostly seem dockingstation-related. It's on XPSP2, so I was hoping it got better on Vista, but I guess that's one less thing to expect. Sad

andrew2101

Rock solid since I installed it the day it RTM'd. I hate having to use XP now it seems so dated and slow.

Sabot

On my laptop I've gone back to XP because Vista is to slow for gaming.

On my desktop I run Vista and it's NEVER crashed and I pretty much hammer the thing. it's not even three-bad at recovering lost memory. All in all other than performance it's a pretty tight ship.

irascian

My copy constantly blue screens. Originally it was the Nvidia drivers. A few weeks ago a new version became available and that fixed the problem.

Then I won an Adobe Bamboo tablet at MIX07 and since I installed that I find that nearly every time the PC goes into hibernate mode when I come out of it ... another blue screen.

Bas

Very stable for me. I think I've had a video driver die on me a couple of times, but every time it didn't BSOD or reset, I just received a popup message that the display driver experienced and error, and that Vista had restarted it. Thanks Vista!

Rossj

Just ported* our WPF Signage app to Vista, and so far it is running very well indeed. No stability problems so far ... fingers crossed.

* Read: ran

Sabot

irascian wrote:

My copy constantly blue screens. Originally it was the Nvidia drivers. A few weeks ago a new version became available and that fixed the problem.

Then I won an Adobe Bamboo tablet at MIX07 and since I installed that I find that nearly every time the PC goes into hibernate mode when I come out of it ... another blue screen.

I heard a lot about the quality of Nvidia drivers for Vista before I upgraded and I didn't want to wait for Toshiba to get it's house in order (Geeez they did take their sweet time about releasing Video drivers for Vista)

So, I downloaded a set off http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/.

However, I duel boot my laptop and so it's always in XP rather than Vista, this is mainly due to the performance of Vista.

leeappdalecom

I must say I have not once had a problem with Vista and it's never hung or crashed on me at all.

Then again I am using it on a MacBook where all the drivers are written by Apple.

The OS itself doesn't have problems at all the issue is most definately with drivers. This is the fundamental difference that makes OS X more stable than Windows, the fact that all the systems hardware is 100% controlled, the only time I ever had a problem with OS X was when I instealled some dodgy RAM.

And to top it off the performance of Vista is absolutely fine, I use it most for Office and VS and VS opens up almost instantly, I've never had that on a machine before.

andrew2101

leeappdalecom wrote:

I must say I have not once had a problem with Vista and it's never hung or crashed on me at all.

Then again I am using it on a MacBook where all the drivers are written by Apple.

The OS itself doesn't have problems at all the issue is most definately with drivers. This is the fundamental difference that makes OS X more stable than Windows, the fact that all the systems hardware is 100% controlled, the only time I ever had a problem with OS X was when I instealled some dodgy RAM.

And to top it off the performance of Vista is absolutely fine, I use it most for Office and VS and VS opens up almost instantly, I've never had that on a machine before.

I am so tempted to do this next time I change my laptop

Chadk

Rock solid.

Yggdrasil

leeappdalecom wrote:

Then again I am using it on a MacBook where all the drivers are written by Apple.

Really? Apple write the Windows drivers for all their hardware? The GPUs are stock NVidia/Intel chips, aren't they?