Poor misunderstood and beleaguered Microsoft. Though at times they can appear to be their own worst enemy, at others they appear more to be the victims of others in the operating system ecosystem, over whom they have no control and seemingly little influence. A class-action lawsuit is going forward over the sale of Vista-ready PCs, compounding their Windows Vista problems, and from some of the unsealed evidence in this case it appears that many of the problems with Vista were not of Microsoft’s doing, but were in fact problems with Vista drivers made available by Microsoft’s partners. In situations such as these, there’s no guarantee that if you were to download Vista SP1 you’d improve the stability and robustness of your computer at all; the power and the responsibility to fix the problems rests with the driver providers. We’ll give you the names of the most guilty offenders in just a moment.
Before you rush to kneejerk thoughts of “Vista vs XP? XP every time!”, or the more forceful “Vista sucks”, do bear in mind that Vista is an incredibly complex system, and as we explained in this recent article about similar Vista driver woes, patches and hot fixes were inevitable, as the software instabilities were identified and resolved.
So let us open the white envelope and give you, in reverse order, the five leading companies responsible for Vista crashes during an unspecified period of 2007, as measured by the crash logs reported to Microsoft.
In 5th place, Intel, with a little under 9% of crashes reported. ATI (now AMD), comes in just ahead of them with a little over 9%. Unknown or unattributed causes resulted in 17% of reported failures, filling third place.
Microsoft caused themselves considerable difficulties. Their own applications, drivers and other software caused almost 18% of the Vista crashes reported; enough to see them comfortably into second place.
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Cue tension-inducing drum-roll, if you please….
Ladies and gentlemen, the title of “Vista Crash Kings” for 2007, bestowed upon the company responsible for causing Vista crashes in almost 30% of all the crash logs reported to Microsoft during this time period (479,326 of the 1,663,327 total logs filed) is the world leader in visual computing technologies™, Nvidia. An achievement not to be taken lightly.
Sadly, no-one from Nvidia could be here to collect this award tonight, but on their behalf we’d like to say that Nvidia’s problems in migrating their driver support from Windows XP to Vista are very well-documented, and for much of 2007 drivers for their new flagship G80 graphics processors were incomplete, unstable beta downloads only. The situation is much improved now, and we hope that lessons have been learned by all.
While Vista had problems of its own making during much of 2007, some of which continue today, to lay all the blame for Vista’s issues at Microsoft’s door is grossly unfair. The widely-held perception, that Vista was shipped before it was ready, and as delivered was buggy,
unstable and generally pretty fragile, may owe more to the difficulties faced by independent hardware vendors than anything else.
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