Anyone crashed vista yet?

[Joe42]

Has anyone managed to crash vista yet and if so how?

Stability is the only thing that makes me want to upgrade from xp atm, so i really want to see just how good vista is in this respect.

The three main stability issues i seem to suffer from are:
-Random crashes i.e trying to do a few things at once, try to browse a cd and then click on a few other things as it spins up, windows will crash or lock. Try minimising a game and doing something else intensive, it often crashes.
-Leaving machines on 24/7, they always need a reboot after a few weeks due to a crash, xp can't seem to be used for 24/7 operation without occasional reboots.
-Regular formatting. I think its a generally accepted fact that unless you keep your machine very clean and basically don't use it for much xp eventually develops problems or just a general lack of performance and tends to require a format every year or so.

So, have these been solved in vista? Can it be left on 24/7, filled with hundreds of programs, and aggressively multi-tasked without causing reduced performance, crashes, or necessitating a format and reinstall?

 

[Freakfish1]

Why would you want to keep your PC on 24/7 unless you are running a server? what about the environment all that carbon?

I have managed to crash it. However, i was stressing it to the max. The clever thing is, Vista warns you before the crash takes place and then you can save all documents and then shut down yourself safely.

If you are running you PC 24/7 sign up to a renewable engery provider. I signed up to these guys!

www.good-energy.co.uk

 

[Combat squirrel]

If your crashing that often sounds like a hardware or driver fault, my XP runs nearly forever without crashing

 

[dirtydog]

Why would you want to keep your PC on 24/7 unless you are running a server? what about the environment all that carbon?

LOL please save that tripe for GD

Many of us run our machines 24/7 and there are good reasons for doing so.

 

[NathanE]

I think I've had about 5 month uptime from my XP machine. It's a rock solid OS providing you aren't using crap drivers. In general it also helps to have a purely Intel chipset system as Americans write better chipset drivers than folk in Taiwan

My install of XP at home was done in Feb' 2002. Not formatted it since then as I've not had any need to. I have tons and tons of junk installed too. It's gone through RTM->SP1->SP2 upgrades and hundreds of hot fixes too without any problems. It's also had a couple spyware infections back in the pre-SP2 days - but I cleaned these out manually myself. So no, I don't think it's an "accepted fact" at all I do think however that many enthusiasts tend to tinker with their PC's and occassionally screw things up and can't be bothered to fix it manually.

My XP machine has never crashed or BSOD'd so I can't agree there either

 

[Lysander]

If your crashing that often sounds like a hardware or driver fault, my XP runs nearly forever without crashing

I was thinking the same thing. Often crashes are not the fault of the OS, but insufficient RAM.

 

[Luke]

Sorry, but I don't give a toss about how much power I'm using. It may be a selfish attitude, but I pay for the electricity and will use it how I please. The environmental issue has nothing to do with the OP's question.
If he runs his pc 24/7 then that's his choice.

 

[dirtydog]

I think I've had about 5 month uptime from my XP machine. It's a rock solid OS providing you aren't using crap drivers. In general it also helps to have a purely Intel chipset system as Americans write better chipset drivers than folk in Taiwan

...

My XP machine has never crashed or BSOD'd so I can't agree there either

Yep XP has been incredibly good on my machine, which is also an Intel chipset system. This is why I scratch my head when people say Vista will offer much better reliability. For me, it couldn't do.

 

[NathanE]

A PC uses less power than refridgerator so it's hardly killing the planet. If you want to make a difference to global warming go protest out front Easyjet HQ or one of the many global shipping companies. These industries account for the vast majority of our tans in the summer.

 

[Immsy]

Stable for me so far, 3 hours and counting. Infact im quite surprised how good it runs.

 

[NathanE]

Yep XP has been incredibly good on my machine, which is also an Intel chipset system. This is why I scratch my head when people say Vista will offer much better reliability. For me, it couldn't do.

Vista will offer increased "theoretical" reliability. I think that's a good way of explaining it. User-mode drivers... yummy In the event of a crash, Vista also offers a simple to use utility to find out exactly what caused the crash. In XP you'd have to be a nigh-on programmer with a copy of a Win32 debugger to find out what caused the BSOD.

 

[dirtydog]

What, you get to eat them? Yeah I agree that sounds good.

Am I right in saying that one of the reasons for Windows slowing down over time is the registry getting ever more bloated? And seeing as Vista uses the same system, it will probably behave in the same way?

 

[NathanE]

Not really, XP SP2 improved the performance of the Registry a lot. Vista x64 has even more performance tweaks to the Registry. You'd be surprised how little load is actually placed on the Registry.

That said, Microsoft realises now that it is a single point of failure and it is actually actively discouraged from third parties using it now - where possible. .NET programs for example use seperate ".config" files stored in the program's local directory.

The biggest things that slow down Explorer in XP is:

1. the number of file type registrations
2. the size of the start menu (hence icons that need to be precached)
3. the number of fonts installed
4. third party control panel applets
5. a few others along the same lines I can't think of right now

Would not surprise me at all if the Registry is deprecated for third party use in Vienna.

 

[v0n]

I haven't crashed it as such, but it does develop some annoying habits already, like in XP you could drag and drop file to any empty space in explorer next to the files and it would always land in root of open directory, in Vista it seems that space next to the item or folder in explorer belongs to that item and folder and so it puts it there rather than root. Messy and annoying as you have to scroll to the bottom of list every time. Another annoying issue is with old shell intergration commands and that bloody excuse for sudo vista has - right click on a file, expand to here or unrar to here, nothing happens. Try again. Nothing. WTF? Well, security wouldn't let the app to use temp directory in Docs&Settings and didn't bother to tell you about it. Then there is that mess Vista puts everywhere if you are used to "show hidden and system files" view - $RECYCLES on all drives, some ~ and $'d folders and files on desktop, joke, just joke... It's brand new and it already looks like a bunch of Romanian hackers set up a camp and had a one drunken party at night...

 

[Dureth]

I'm very impressed with Vista so far. I left Serious Sam 2 running but paused while I went for some food. Came back to find that the system had hibernated. Brought it back to life and logged in. It said that the 3d driver couldnt be recovered and proceded to reboot the graphics driver. It did this then Serious Sam 2 popped back up and I continued on where I had left off. Even a graphics driver crash doesn't stop your game!

 

[Joe42]

Why would you want to keep your PC on 24/7 unless you are running a server? what about the environment all that carbon?

Both fold, and one runs mce so its often recording stuff. Its up to my government whom i pay taxes to to deal with the environment (although they don't). If i could get clean electricity for less from a renewable source i would, but this would be bad for the economy so the government aren't particularly interested. I'd happily have a wind farm in my back garden if it helps, and indeed we have looked at getting a wind turbine but the only one available is completely useless, and there is no government incentive to produce a better one.

I have managed to crash it. However, i was stressing it to the max. The clever thing is, Vista warns you before the crash takes place and then you can save all documents and then shut down yourself safely.

Did it say why it crashed? What were you doing, just out of curiosity?

If you are running you PC 24/7 sign up to a renewable engery provider. I signed up to these guys!

It costs more though, i'm not going to pay more for it. Call me selfish if you like, but whatever i do isn't going to make a blind bit of difference on the scale of things. If i could get cheaper electricity from a green source i would, if the government took it seriously i would have this as an option, but they don't.

Sorted your url for you. You need to put the url in the open url tag ()and then the link itself in between the two url tags.

If your crashing that often sounds like a hardware or driver fault, my XP runs nearly forever without crashing

I don't think its a hardware fault. Quite likely a driver fault, more likely an unstable os, not my fault either way. Vista claims to address both these issues.

Maybe i'm just unlucky, but my system seems to crash quite often. It crashed three times yesterday each time because i minimised halo. No reason at all, never used to do that. The mce system crashes about once a week with a meaningless error, no idea why, it does nothing but display and record tv. I can only assume something on it likes to be reloaded into memory every week or so, could easily be a driver.

I think you can crash any xp system by trying to burn something to a cd and then doing something intensive while it spins up. Any xp system will also hang while it waits for the cd to spin up. Has this bug been fixed in vista?
You can also crash explorer if you do something intensive while its trying to access a networked pc thats not online. Has this been fixed?

I think I've had about 5 month uptime from my XP machine. It's a rock solid OS providing you aren't using crap drivers. In general it also helps to have a purely Intel chipset system as Americans write better chipset drivers than folk in Taiwan

I agree, i think the drivers are the problem, but its the os thats got to solve this problem, and vista claims to. I have no choice about using rubbishy drivers, i have to use the drivers that come with the product, nothing i can do if they're rubbish.

My install of XP at home was done in Feb' 2002. Not formatted it since then as I've not had any need to. I have tons and tons of junk installed too. It's gone through RTM->SP1->SP2 upgrades and hundreds of hot fixes too without any problems. It's also had a couple spyware infections back in the pre-SP2 days - but I cleaned these out manually myself. So no, I don't think it's an "accepted fact" at all I do think however that many enthusiasts tend to tinker with their PC's and occassionally screw things up and can't be bothered to fix it manually.

Thats pretty good innings. I never bothered with reinstalls myself, but without doing a reinstall regularly i find xp gets very sluggish, particularly when you fill it up with programs.

My XP machine has never crashed or BSOD'd so I can't agree there either

Are you seriously saying its never crashed, you've never had to ctrl-alt-del and end task, or press the reset button?
I must be doing something wrong then.

I think i need to keep a crash log, as i can't remember many crashes i've had off the top of my head. As i say the last one i remember was the other day when i tried to minimized halo while it was refreshing the sever list, did that three times and it crashed every time. Could easily be halo at fault, and that would be ok if it was just halo that crashed, but i had to hard reset, it crashed the entire os. I want to know if this sort of thing is also a problem with vista.

I was thinking the same thing. Often crashes are not the fault of the OS, but insufficient RAM.

Fair enough, but when you've got more than the minimum specified ram or even more than the recommended ram required to run xp, it should not crash. If it does thats the fault of the os.

 

[drak3]

I crashed my Vista many times, and after I spent some time looking into what was causing it I found out that:

The X-Fi fatal1ty audio card I have is causing the hang up. I guess is the BETA poorly implemented drivers for vista by creative. Basically when I pluged in my headset vista hunged up. Is all about drivers ....

 

[Joe42]

I'm very impressed with Vista so far. I left Serious Sam 2 running but paused while I went for some food. Came back to find that the system had hibernated. Brought it back to life and logged in. It said that the 3d driver couldnt be recovered and proceded to reboot the graphics driver. It did this then Serious Sam 2 popped back up and I continued on where I had left off. Even a graphics driver crash doesn't stop your game!

That sounds very impressive.

That reminds me of another common xp crash, trying to hibernate or standby or something whilst doing something intensive, i seem to remember it crashing due to that before. Sounds like this has been fixed. Looks like it may well have been due to the graphics driver, and vista has solved this by being able to reboot the graphics driver.

 

[NathanE]

The new display driver model in Vista may still be kernel mode based but they've added lots of new resilience features. The Serious Sam incident is a good example of its power.

Obviously it would be better if Nvidia and ATI simply fixed the bugs in their drivers in the first place - then Vista wouldn't have to fall back to reloading the driver in the first place!

 

[Joe42]

The new display driver model in Vista may still be kernel mode based but they've added lots of new resilience features. The Serious Sam incident is a good example of its power.

Obviously it would be better if Nvidia and ATI simply fixed the bugs in their drivers in the first place - then Vista wouldn't have to fall back to reloading the driver in the first place!

The brilliant thing about it is there is finally proof that it is the drivers, which we knew all along, but now finally they might do something about it and fix the bugs.