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Windows Fails 8% of the Time
descubes writes "A Journal du Net article reports that about 8% of Windows sessions require a machine reboot.
The relevant quote (translated from french) is: "The average rate of failures requiring a system reboot has been measured at around 8% per session. This number varies widely depending on the version of Windows. Windows 2000 has a failure rate of 4%, and NT4 is at 3%, whereas Windows XP is close to 12%." The study was originally made by Acadys and Microcost and gathered data from 1.2M machines belonging to about one thousand companies over a period of one month in seven different countries."
For once some of us don't have to RTFA! Now when we look at the numbers we go ooooh, look MSFT is teh suxx0r! But look at which versions of Windows tend to fail. NT at 3% and Win2k at 4%. NT and Win2k are being run by people with more of a clue than those running XP. XP was aimed more at the home market while NT and 2k were not nearly as much.
So, maybe the article tells more than the blurb, but it would appear to me that the reason that XP crashes more is that the people who are running it could be partly at fault (ie worms, trojans, poor hardware choices with outdated drivers).
Personally I use 2k at work and XP at home (for my Windows machines) and I can't remember a crash for either. Work is a bit of a stretch as I do shut it down daily but the XP machine hums along just fine without problems.
YMMV.
Now why didnt they do a study on Win 3.1? I mean that was the only good windows version! :)
My Web Site - www.ocean-liners.com
I get about half way through starting my reply before Windows crashes on me caus
I thought it was just normal to reboot 35 times a day.
English
Mark
And what is the reboot rate of various Linux distros? Unless they're willing to do a comparison under the same protocols, I very much hope that no one here points to this as more proof of needing to switch to Linux, even though I know it will come up.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
after all, no boot, no crash!
It's a feature, not a bug! Rebooting 1)cleans up memory 2) makes you do something useful 3) makes you aquanted with the hardware 4) teaches you elementary computer skills
http://www.automatiq.se
If you leave your computer running until it needs a reboot, your "failure rate" by their definition is 100%, even if you reboot only once every 6 months.
Because if you notice the sampling in the post (rtfp?), it states:
The study was originally made by Acadys and Microcost and gathered data from 1.2M machines belonging to about one thousand companies over a period of one month in seven different countries."
Emphasis mine.
French -> English
Does this include computers being mauled by worms and spyware because the user is John Q. Clicksyesalot?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
One does need to wonder under what conditions those computers were in. My Windows XP boxes hardly ever crash, and if so usually its a hardware failure (Video card overheats, processor overheats [welcome to Florida!]). All the computers we have at the college run Windows XP, specially tweaked to keep students doing school work [not dorm boxes] and will clean themselves up when they are rebooted.. these boxes too usually never fail unless its hardware, and operate all day with many different users per day. I also wonder, since my views are somewhat cleaned by our nice IT folks at the college, what these computers they monitored were like. Was there ad-ware on a few? A few viruses maybe? It happens, and IT can't always be there to fix those problems.
My point simply is usually its not Windows XP faulting for me, its something else not getting along with it. Be it [insert]ware, or hardware issues. Good example is I hardly ever reboot this computer, it has easily gained weeks of uptime, usually only shutting down due to thunderstorms taking out the electrical lines.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
windows xp is the evolution of 2000, and was geared just as much for businesses (the professional version) as homes (home version). The prof and home versions also share the same kernel..
I think this article mixed up windows xp with windows millenium....
-gabe
... is that the windows faliure rate is INCREASING.
28% of the time devoted to the couple transport/Internet, 2% with Excel
To launch the impression
15/09/2004.
What makes the employees one to their computer? It is with this thorny that question has study undertaken by Microcost - in collaboration with Acadys - sort to answer. Year investigation whose objectifies is not to supervises the users goal who wishes to poses the bases of has reflexion around the rationalization of the costs have glances management of park.
During one month, 1 285 500 working scannés stations were near has thousand of companies distributed in 7 European countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, England, Italy).
First carryforward, has to use spends one average two hours and fifteen minutes per day one its dated-processing station. With time that it devotes for more than one quarter (28%) to Internet/transport couple. The remainder of time, the applications office automation, the trades applications and the Windows to explore respectively occupy 17%, 14% and 9% of the use of year employee. The 17% of the office automation applications station-wagon up into 15% for the 2% and text processing for Excel.
With company thus may find it beneficial any to modify its policy of software licence according to the use in order not to pay has complete office automation continuation principal yew the exploited tool remains the text processing. According to the study, 10 software concentrates 67% of the use. With figure which amounts even to 89% in the industrial sector, whereas it is limited to 42% At the service companies.
In more of the dated relating to the uses of the software, the FRIENDLY software (At the origin of information receuillies for the study) makes it possible to obtain figures have glances reliability of the operating systems Microsoft. Thus, the average failure misses requiring has restarting of the system is measured around 8% per session. This appears fluctuates largely according to the version of Windows. Indeed, Windows 2000 obtains has failure misses of 4% and NT4 of 3% whereas Windows XP flirte with the 12%.
Lastly, the study reveals the use of paid have glances impression. Zero paper is not topicality since 10 pages are printed one average per day and to use. They corresponds to 3 gold 4 orders of impression of which the half are intended for local printers, other half with printers networks. However, yew the cost of year reaches impression has few hundred of euros when it is carried out one has printer network, it is multiplied by five when it is carried out one has local printer, because of the consumable price of the ones.
To also note, without surprised, that 95% of the stations customers are equipped with has Windows environment, version 2000 being prevalent At the professionals. In place under 42% of the stations, this version largely replaced Windows NT 4 which counts nothing any more goal 16%. Have for Windows XP, it breads to find its public, in particular At the industrialists who choose to 83% for Windows 2000. Only the service companies cuts 5% of to their dated-processing park under general Windows XP while the average is around the 2%.
Behind all these figures, the company of council recommends several solutions to the dated-processing directions in order to rationalize to their management of dated-processing park. Among these recalls of good control, the company quotes successively the recourse to the light customer, the uses of software Open source, the optimization of the management of the licences and the increase in the duration of renewal of the material park have well have software.
I can't believe those fail that often. I haven't used windows daily for years now, so I'm a bit out of the loop. When an app crashes in Linux there's no rebooting needed, just some minor cursing at lost data.
Regardless of how entrenched Windows is in the world, I still can't believe more ppl wouldn't want to try a different OS less than putting up with the cra...
CB(_#@>>>>
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free ipod and free gmail!
One of my friend had an uptime of 1 month with is XP box.
Considering he does a lot on it and that he was able to last that long without being forced by "setup wizards" to reboot, this is a record.
But when XP runs that long without reboot, it REALLY becomes unstable.
He showed me and I had never seen so much unstability. Every progs crash. That was terrible.
I do believe you don't need to reboot often, but it still is necessary.
Because I shutdown nightly :)
I find it hard to believe Windows XP crashes 12% of the time. I run XP at work and at home. Here at work I am building, compiling, crashing code, running about 20 things at once and I almost never need to reboot. I shut down on weekends, and sometimes at night to save the company some dough, but I rarely need to reboot.
At home, I play games, surf the web, write in MS Office...all of the typical things a normal user would do. Plus I do things that a "power user" might do. Newsgroups, Irc, nothing too great...and I NEVER reboot. I would say on average I need to reboot about once a month when Seti@home decides to get flakey or something. Does that count as needing to reboot...after a month!!?? Then I guess it needs to 100% of the time.
If people need to reboot 12% of the time, then they are doing something wrong. It's not the OS, but more the user in my opinion. XP is a stable system, and does a good job of keeping my machines running.
Win98, however, I would say needs a reboot 50% of the time. The other 50% you have no choice and it dies without a reboot.
Since SP2, the driver support has gone kapoot or something and about 30% of the time i have to reboot now because my vid card goes nuts and gets the refresh rate all wrong or something of that nature... I'm in that "should i just drop it altogether" stage....
Of course the big difference is uptime. My Windows (98) box has been up for 48 hours and is starting to feel sluggish, whereas my Linux box has been running for 4 months.
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What's a 'session'? They give me XP at work. Not my idea of a good time. I reboot XP when I don't understand what's going on, but usually I don't know if XP has failed. It seems to have some problem with degradation of the management of some resource (maybe memory) over very long sessions (a week or more). Then, when the machine gets sluggish and recalcitrant, I reboot. But maybe it's just the network admin spying on my machine or something that I don't even see. Damfino.
Given that XP isn't just Win2K SP5 but is in fact Win2K with an awful lot of extra chrome tacked on, it was never going to be more stable to begin with.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
I run my XP box 24/7 and get 2-4 months of uptime. I would venture to guess that about 10% of my sessions require a reboot, simply for the fact that I don't start any new sessions other than when something fails or is upgraded. If I never did planned upgrades my session failure would be around 100%.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
This is interesting because I migrated my network from NT4 to 2K to XP and I have seen the reverse trend. NT4 seemed to BSOD quite regularly and I have seen reduced BSODs as we migrated o XP. I understand that they are not talking about BSODs only, but most of my machines seem to fail on BSODs more than anything else and that is pretty rare.
I know it's very en vogue to hate Microsoft here, but let's be honest. XP is 1000 times as stable as 2000, but it's with this trade off: device drivers and bad hardware can crash the system.
I've been using XP since the Devil's Own gold disc was out in August 2001, and I've experienced a failure exactly one time. It was due to a bad, unsigned driver.
On the other hand, I have had several reasons to reboot my Windows servers, but in truth, I've had to reboot my Linux servers too. Windows 2003 is a HUGE improvement, and at the same time, my newer Linux servers run for ages without so much as a second glance.
My Linux desktop has lots of applications crash, and frequently - X crashes semi-regularly, and my applications are frequently hit or miss.
The only reason XP needs a reboot more frequently is this: people don't know what they're doing. They don't apply patches, they don't have current AV or spyware protection, and they reboot as the first measure of troubleshooting.
I love Linux, and I want Microsoft to get crushed in court, but I know crap when I hear it. Windows is not as bad a product as it used to be, plain and simple.
No.
Honestly, we know better than that. Windows does not fail that often in the hands of competent people. I have two laptops that get daily heavy use by me (one with 2000, the other with XP) and they do NOT crash. I probably reboot them once or twice a month, I prefer to put them in standby or hibernate when not in use.
The problem is id10t users/businesses who don't install patches/upgrades, insist on using Outlook and Internet Explorer, opening every attachment they receive, browsing questionable web sites, and even purposefully installing spyware shit toolbars and whatnot so they can have a little animated buddy or see what the weather is (look out a window for god's sake!)...
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
I never have problems with Windows. Ever. You should all be ashamed of yourselves for ever doubting them. And 8 is way less than, say, fifty, so it's nothing to get in a tizzy about. Right? Right?!?
But really... is anyone that surprised?
... but if the article does not quantify this failure "rate" as mean-time-beetween-failure (MTBF), then the statistic is worthless. 8% of "sessions" requiring reboot is meaningless, without defining how long is a session.
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
Back in the day when I used NT 4 for a lot of my work, I had failures requiring reboot typically two or three times a week. This was doing application development.
On Windows 2000, the only system crashes or lockups I get are either due to hardware problems, or else due to device drivers (for some reason SoftICE periodically crashes my Win2K box). But I typically go weeks without a problem.
I have never had Windows XP crash, although admittedly I have used it less than either of the above two.
In my view, the article's stats just don't pass the bulls&!t test.
I would be interested to know what passes for a required reboot.
Quite often it was an issue of restarting a service that "required" a reboot.
Then there are the times when the "required" reboot can be achieved by (heaven forfend) logging off and logging on again.
Windows 2000 was definitely better at cutting out spurious reboots than XP. Someone made a point about the user bases for the OSs being different... I would point out that a fair number of large corporations use XP Pro on the desktop, primarily because it is even more manageable than Win2K Pro under AD, which kind of sinks the idea that XP was designed as a home user's OS.
What really mystifies me is the low percentage of Windows NT4 sessions that require reboots... WTF.
I worked with that OS for years and that just doesn't seem right to me.
Not really. I tend to live on the latest driver releases and even the WindowsUpdate drivers crash my machine (Via Rhine 2 NIC Onboard).
The last set of Catalyst drivers for my Radeon 9600 kept crashing the graphics card to black screen, and DirectX isn't as reliable as it was at version 7.0.
12% of the time average, I fit in there at about 8 out of every hundred times I run WindowsXP.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
I never switch off my computer. It is a laptop, so when I don't use it, I let it enter sleep mode. And I resume the *same* session later.
So I really have a failure rate of 100%, I guess.
A bit too high in what sense? Too high for what should be expected from the most popular OS in the world? Then yes, without a doubt. Higher than the crash rate I'd expect? I'd so hell no. It actually seems a bit low to me but let me qualify that: Most people don't reboot their machine *unless* it crashes. It's not like grandma is considering the length of her uptime. Unfortunately, the damn things in Frech so we don't really know if they took that into consideration.
Does my XP machine at work crash 12% of the time... sure. It's development machine so it's much much more than that. In fact, I'd say 95% of my reboots are from OS crashes. Alternatively, my Fedora boxen, one of which is a development machine, has completely crashed once since it's been installed (thanks to nVidia). I don't do AS MUCH development on it but a 95 to 1 ratio is pretty damning.
Regardless, me nor most people I work with and talk to find it suprising the Windows desktops have poor uptime marks and I seriously doubt anyone would be surprised to find Windows desktops uptime marks lower than most alternative OSes.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
well there is an obvious solution... dont hibernate to disk! That will be $500 for tech support fees
another Roadkill on the Information Superhighway
Blargh. This isn't insightful.
"needs a reboot" on a UNIX machine usually means "they released a security update for the kernel", or "the power went out". "needs a reboot" on a Windows machine (yes, I use one) usually means "it bluescreened", or "things are getting slow and weird". At work, it's a pain to get everything running again so I try to avoid it, but I still need to reboot about every 2 weeks or so.
To be fair, much of the instability is caused by shitty 3rd party drivers, but that still doesn't address the root problem of resource leaks and other bugs.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Not necessarily ... my XP Home machine (on two-year-old, approved hardware) needs rebooting *much more often* than my Windows 2000 Professional machine (on five-year-old, approved hardware).
^^^^^^^ Man, those Samoans are a surly bunch.
My French is a little rusty, but this article claims that XP is a hamster and NT4 smelled of elderberry.
You know I don't remember the last time I got a Linux Virus, Spyware (oh what's that spyware removal program called for Linux, oh wait there isn't ONE!), had issues opening up ANY attachment etc.... even those ones that said I LOVE YOU, my linux box never had a problem with them... odd...
Since you REBOOT your laptops every month or so then you can't really make any statements about the availability of a Win2K box and it's abaility to stay up.
I know most of the time when I run windowsupdate I have to reboot my system, when I run apt-get update install on FedoraCore2 it never has told me to reboot yet....
-=Linsys=-
http://www.intrusionsec.com
at least for me, because I only start a new session after a failure of the previous one (ok, not quite true, occasionally one has to reboot after an install).
On the other hand, a session typically runs for a few months.
I support an office which is running W2K on the servers (about 40 of them) and about 300 XP Pro workstations. Since switching from NT to XP, I would have to say that the failure/crash/reboot ratio has dropped considerably. Before the switch it was almost daily that I would have to tell someone to reboot their computer. With XP, I have never told someone to reboot their computer. In fact, my workstation (which gets abused alot more than users workstations) has been up for 4 months now without any issues. I think it all comes down to proper education for the users and IT personel; and proper administration of the computers.
We've got 1200 workstations and another 250 servers. Moving to a managed XP/windows 2003 server environment with the usual seasonings (virus scanning, hotfix management) GREATLY improved our system stability and reduced Helpdesk calls.
Like the linux quotes often say, I only reboot my XP box for patches and hardware updates. (which usually means about once a month for the hot fix updates)
The only guy in our group bitching about XP is the token Mac dude, who screwed up the box doing SOMETHING about a year ago and refuses to reinstall the known good corporate image. (a 10-20 minute process)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
in my CS department. The amount of crow that is getting passed around is amazing these days as many are being forced to switch to Linux or MacOS X for class in the 400 levels and they realize "uhhh those UNIX guys were right about Windows." The irony of it is that we Mac users are usually very good at helping them get started with OSX.
Still, we can't blame Microsoft for a lot of the instability since there are so many users out there using terrible and/or outdated drivers. Microsoft cannot be blamed for the quality of the drivers that most Windows users have because they didn't write them.
Of course I will say this about Windows. It is nice for the first few months, but then it just begins to become as sensually appealing as a rotten piece of bait fish left on your back porch for a few days in the sun. My Macs frequently have several times the uptimes of the Windows PCs I hear about and the Windows users are shocked, "why are 8 weeks of uptime, your PowerBook is still fast and usable."
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Seriously... I'm not a huge fan of MS but I rarely ever need to reboot any of my XP machines. Unless it's a required reboot after new HW or SW is installed. I have some serious doubts about the accuracy of those statitics.
... that the French don't know how to use computers.
In other news, 5% of the French that had to reboot their computer also surrendered to a local CompUSA.
Live web cams
"Windows Fails 8% of the Time"
No. 8% of Windows failures require a reboot. Big difference.
My linux box crashes 100% of the time.
But then, the only reason I would reboot is because of a crash, so that's a pointless statistic.
If the PC's at our company failed this much, I'd be out of a job.
My laptop, running Win2K is up and running around 12-14 hours a day and I can't remember it ever crashing. I only got this laptop after moving jobs to a project management one. My previous job within the same company, using the exact same image of Win2K, involved a lot of development in Websphere using IBM's WSAD, and I'd see a crash/blue screen at least twice a day.
I'm fairly sure that if you left a Windows box up without ever touching it or running anything on it it'd work 100% of the time. It's all down to circumstances.
------
Guns don't kill people, rappers do!
--- Band: Joey Ultra
Alt-SysRq-R
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
How exactly were these figures reached? Is a 'machine reboot' when Windows completely hangs and the power must be cut, or when things run sluggish and you shutdown? If I run my box for a month until it dies, does that mean it requires a 'machine reboot' 100% of the time?
Surely there must be an imbalance between what kind of tasks are performed and what run times are reached by machines running Win98 vs Win2000 or WinXP.
I don't know if these details are in the article, my French isn't too hot and the translation is a tad unclear. If someone more familiar with the language could enlighten me, that might help.
I am disappointed that in such a huge study, Microsofts now recognised competitor isn't even considered for comparison.
Windows 2000 has a failure rate of 4%, and NT4 is at 3%, whereas Windows XP is close to 12%.
Wait a second, Windows is getting worse?!
BS!
.NET (7.1 for you purists) on Windows and gcc 3.3.2 on Solaris and Linux.
My experience:
I develop cross platform applications in C++. My code targets Visual C++
I beat the living hell out of my boxes. While most of my code lives in user land (no kernel hacking for me) I still put these machines to the test.
My XP test box has an uptime of months - last time I "turned it off" was when the company replaced the air conditioning and all the power was cut off.
My development box? Yeah I reboot it everyday - but only because I dual boot into Linux (which, BTW, locks up every time when I shut down.)
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
He's right. In Windows XP, Click on Start/ Control Panel/ System/ Advanced/ Startup and Recovery Settings/. Uncheck "Automatically Restart".
--
Bush's education improvements were fraud
...I'm using windows and it hasn't cra
For raw reboots, the worst would technically be Mac OS 8, since its memory model caused a single crashing app to take down the whole system. Despite this, many users were still productive with it, since you could go for long stretches between app crashes. And even under OS X and any Windows, the most frequent situation I've encountered (outside of updates) that required a restart was a broken shut down sequence. (Really! I've had many occurances where to shut down a computer, I have had to restart it first.)
Those who complain about affect & effect on
THis is a bit misleading, I think. I run some of the most crashworthy programs you can imagine on XP. 3D apps with beta drivers, AVID editing software, After Effects-- all things that are known for their crashiness, but it's VERY rare that I have to reboot. I do, howevever, ocassionally have to kill a process. Many users may not know how to find the misbehaving process and kill it. So they do what they know how to do-- hit the reset switch.
Ocassionally, while running Doom3, I might hard lock-- My office isn't well insulated, and my machine can get pretty hot when stressed.. Plus I'm running hacked drivers on my video card, so I don't really blame anybody but myself. Otherwise, I cannot remember the last time I HAD to reboot other than software/driver installation.. (And driver installation doesn't always require that anymore...)
This level of stability, in my experience, is virtually the same in Linux.. It runs programs that ocassionally crash, or you have to kill em, and you can get hardware video lockups causing a reboot if you try to do "daring" things (which most people don't do because of the lack of games/3D apps for linux.) I'm not trolling here, just trying to objectively compare the situation..
I think this is just part of computing-- and maybe all OS'es can do a better job of recognizing what apps are really crashed, and helping the user dispose of them a bit better.
1 of my 2k boxes, maybe once a month
1 of my 2k boxes, once a week (usually crashes during screensaver)
XP laptop, never had it crash (1 year)
Just to give you an idea of how much the /. editors missed the point of the article (it's based on what % of errors require a reboot, not sessions), I've decided to give an analogy.
/. point to Windows servers when in reality it is 8% of the links point to slashdotted windows servers.
It's like saying that 8% of the links on
12% of sessions in Windows XP simply do not lead to crashes. That is, if you actively scan for spyware and adware and don't just rely on your AV software. 8% *does* sound like a good percentage for Windows 98 sessions, which crashed on a ridiculous basis (the only saving grace was that it took 15 seconds to reboot in most cases).
That's nothing. I've got a Linux machine that has failed 50%(*) - all you bloody communist gays you got it all wrong with that windos hatred.
(*) exactly 50%. In 3 years, 4 months of service, it failed once, and was shut down properly once for relocation. That's 50% failure rate, right?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I think this number may fall to about 1.3% if we could just get everyone to stop using WeatherBug and Windows ME.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I would personally say that if you turn off all the crud that WinXP has it will be just as stable as Win2k - in the end they are the same basic OS. I would however say that driver quality is the most important part of a stable computer - having not the latest drivers but the drivers that were best shourtly after your hardware was near the top of the ladder increases stability again.
;-) Seriously though - are there ANY non rubbish advantages to running WinXP?
However I am running Win2k makes me think maybe I shouldn't upgrade for a while yet! I'm sure shorthorn will be uber stable!
And also what counts as 'needs a reboot'. It seems to me that the IT dept. love to say reboot your machine for ever possible problem rather than finding a solution.
That's a failure rate of 0%. This isn't just a router PC - it's used for all things including compiling, development and web serving. The trouble is the software is actually more reliable than the hardware.
...the other 8%?
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Note also I expect they arn't going into much detail about how many boxes of each were in testing. I know companies who still use Windows NT 4.0 Server (thus, maybe 10-20 boxes in all per company).. Just one example.
Who knows.
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
The only BSOD I have seen on WinXP also required a complete reinstall (massive corruption)
I help maintain about 90 XP machines, and reboots like this just don't have to happen that often.
If these numbers are accurate (my experience says that 12% is wildly, wildly exaggerated) then somewhere out there are a whole bunch of horribly maintained machines rebooting 100% of the sessions.
The PC I am on right now has been running this image of XP over a year, and I can't think of a single time I have had to restart it.
"Sig free in '03!"
Any halfway decent OS should not have to reboot for anything except updating the Kernel or Hardware/Power-Failures. I don't really see why Windows-Users are so happy to blame 3rd-Party-Software that should in a worst-case-scenario be unable to run or crash itself but never take the OS with it.
Linux is not Windows
the mind boggles.
--- Back to the trees, back to the trees !
If Windows hadn't crashed. 5 minutes and I think it's time for another reboot.
... it's called http://www.uptime-project.net/.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
Whether shutting a computer down will save electricity is not very clear.
Some guy I know went half a year with the same computer running continuously and half a year with shutting it down when not needed. Had power management properly configured for computer and CRT and had a kWh meter mounted on the wall socket it was all connected to.
Running continuously saved more electricity. If you shut down once a day, and start up once a day, I guess this will reverse, and new processors with higher leakage will take their toll (this was in the end-90s!). But when running all the time your components will live longer (except you have a bad thermal design for your box and they get too hot), and that is a lot better for the planet, because with current recycling tech computer components are mostly toxic or near-toxic waste!
8% isn't so bad, especially when you consider how long machines are up before they are rebooted. Company machines are often up for several days at a time (sometimes a few weeks) before a reboot. Sure, 1 out of 12 times I might have to reboot due to one issue or another, but 1 out of 12 (8%) is really pretty good, all things considered. That 1 time comes maybe once a month.
For me, there's OS-related crashes in Windows 2000 (at work) or XP (at home) about as often, and then it's maybe once every two weeks or so. And I almost never get blue screens, with the only times I recall it being graphics driver problems which was fairly easy to fix.
The OS crashes are mostly explorer.exe crashes now and then, but those can usually be fixed just by killing the process, which will make Windows auto-restart it. I haven't noticed any data loss involved since shutting down Explorer doesn't imply shutting down other apps. No re-login is required either, etc.
I think the system stability has become good enough that it isn't an issue for me as a regular user anymore, and not really something I take into consideration when deciding what OS I should run. At the rate they're appearing -- sometimes about once a month or less -- I'll accept them, since I know from experience that other desktop OS'es aren't rock solid either.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
More like they dropped a zero.
I wonder about format intervals. I know that after 6-18 months, my XP box can degrade to the point of requiring manual reboots constantly. A reformat/reinstall typically brings me back to ~95%.
G
It is not necessarily the failure rate of "Windows", it is the failure rate of "Windows" as affected by running likely shoddily-written programs on it in non-user mode.
MORTAR COMBAT!
[foobar@localhost /usr/bin]#./eliza "rutine" /usr/bin]#./spellcheck -c "rutine" /usr/bin]#./man -psychic rutine /usr/bin]#uptime
Since when do you have this obsession with rutine ?
[foobar@localhost
bad word "rutine"
Nearest replacement: "routine"
[foobar@localhost
You might mean "uptime"
[foobar@localhost
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
BSD's and GNU/Linux's have a much lower failure rate than that.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Most organizations that I have worked in are running NT4.0 for a reason. Usually 1 older app that is mostly DOS based, and has almost certainly been custom built for the job it's doing. (mostly server-side too)
These types of systems can usually stay running untill the hardware dies. Systems running W2k & XP are usually used in a more dynamic environment where you have complex apps and Db's running that stress the system more AND are also used as workstations.
I work for a company that had a Novell server v4.10 that had an uptime of over 5 years! It was hidden in a TV cabinet and coated with dust & dirt. It was used as a print-server.
If your usage of a server could be replaced by a solid-state style "appliance", then it should not be eligle for uptime based surveys.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
IANA Regular Windows User..
Frankly, I'm kind of surprised that NT was more stable than 2K and that XP was less stable.
My impression has always been that Win 2K was Finally Good Enough. So good, that upgrading to anything else was not even really needed in most cases. So good, that XP had to meet a high bar and be at least marginally better to convince users they needed to upgrade.
I suspect what is going on is that those users that we'll alternately call SuperPowerExtremeProfessionals (when they're around) or CluelessHavocWreakers (can we talk?) are motivated to change to something newer based on how much they make things crash on whatever environment and OS they happen to be on.
IOW, there's no helping the helpless.
And, as a cautionary note, peope in the FOSS world, people that would be aghast if someone were to repeatedly power cycle their machines during some delicate fsck, should note that the kinds of dissatisfied Windows users that will be moving to Linux, will be those Windows users like the neighbor kid in Toy Story.
It'll be kind of like the Mariel boat lift when Cuba granted freedom to citizens to emigrate to the US - and took the opportunity to empty its prisons and mental asylums.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
XP Pro is XP Home with extra bits. The only difference between Home and Pro are things like IIS, which (fairly obviously) is included in Professional, but not Home. In fact, with a little kludging, you can add it XP Home.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
From www.m-w.com:
Main Entry: ensure
Pronunciation: in-'shur
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): ensured; ensuring
Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French enseurer, probably alteration of Old French aseürer -- more at ASSURE
: to make sure, certain, or safe : GUARANTEE
synonyms ENSURE, INSURE, ASSURE, SECURE mean to make a thing or person sure. ENSURE, INSURE, and ASSURE are interchangeable in many contexts where they indicate the making certain or inevitable of an outcome, but INSURE sometimes stresses the taking of necessary measures beforehand, and ASSURE distinctively implies the removal of doubt and suspense from a person's mind. SECURE implies action taken to guard against attack or loss.
Hibernate and standby.
Save power and have instant access.
Why should anyone shut down when standby lets you get your system back in less than 10 seconds?
At work I only suspend my XP box.
At home I only put my Mac to sleep.
Why should we shut down daily?
Why should we reboot daily?
It's more productive if I can save state... Go back exactly where I left off the previous session.
GPL Deconstructed
Christ, WTF do you do for work? I thought I was bad with 2 to 5 copies of Visual Studio .NET 2003 running at once, Firefox (with 30+ tabs open), and Paint Shop Pro 8. Of course this is all running from an M200 tablet PC...
It really sucks to be one of the ones pulling the XP average up. a faulty S3 driver+ memory upgrade in my compaq laptop puts XP at about 8% sessions where I don't have to do a power switch reboot. The laptop I didn't just recieve for work probably averages 1-2 week uptime running slackware.
I see a trend here: NT 3%, 2000 4%, XP 12%... That is a 33% increase from NT to 2000 and 300% increase from 2000 to XP. So logically the next step is a 3000% increase in crash rates from XP to the next Windows version!!! Wow.. it will crash BEFORE you turn it on. Talk about progress!
I think quite a few people here have already shown that this "study" needs to provide some more specific statistics and raw data before we can come to any meaningful conclusions. It looks though like normal office use so I'm assuming the machine is turned on when they get in in the morning and off when they leave in the afternoon.
Something else I noticed is that they say the average daily use was 2 hours and 15 minutes, with 28% of that time on the internet and the rest spent on office / trade applications. These are not power users by any means.
I wonder if by "the average failure rate requiring a restarting of the system is measured around 8% per session" (taken from Babelfish) they mean that 8% of those average 2 hour and 15 minute seesions end in a reboot? That would be quite unacceptable to almost any business.
Another bit of information that could act as a measuring tool is the reboot rate for office Linux users.
All in all, I don't think this article really shed any light on the reliability of M$ products.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
Infected in 20 minutes
Out of the box home windows xp has on average 20 minutes (if on a uni network, much less) before it is taken over.
corporate networks should all now be firewalled... shouldn't they?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
If you're shutting down every weekend, doesn't that count as at least one reboot a week for you? Maybe even more?
Why not just leave the computer in suspend instead, for the weekend, every weekend, for a month and see what the stability of your system is, instead?
I only suspend my system every night, and haven't had it crash yet. Get uptimes in the months.
But if we use your system as an example, you are getting a much higher number than 0, since you voluntarily shut down each week!
GPL Deconstructed
I also have a laptop which is not so stable. This is mostly due to a stinky ATI Radeon 9000 driver Acer can't be bothered updating with bug fixes. Consequently games like Far Cry kill the machine stone dead. I won't be buying Acer again.
I've not had a kernel panic on Linux for years now and only a few on my OS X box and none recently. Both IMHO are far more stable than XP.
I've been using XP for a combined 4 man-years or so (one year or so, on 4 different machines). I have had ZERO bluescreens. This is on two desktops, and two laptops.
I DO have to reboot for the odd driver install (graphic driver updates, etc.), but NEVER for an OS failure of anykind.
XP has been a rock for me.
"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." - Thomas Jefferson
Here's the relevant bit: The study was originally made by Acadys and Microcost and gathered data from 1.2M machines belonging to about one thousand companies over a period of one month in seven different countries."
These are not home machines. Someone else also did a poor translation of TFA, and it seems that the slice of the total that is XP is very low.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
(Ok, so my karma is already excellent, it's a joke. sheesh.)
Here's what I make out of this. I am French, but some of the phrases and jargon were difficult to translate.
------
Microsoft and Acadys monitored 1,285,500 european workers in seven european countries for one month.
The average user spends 28% of their time, or 2 hours and 15 minutes, on the net and IM. The rest of the time is spent using the office suite (17%), work-specific software (14%) and windows explorer (9%). The 17% in the office suite is composed of 15% word-processing and 2% Excel.
Ten software titles account for 67% of computer use, as high as 89% in the industrial sector and only 42% in services.
The survey also collected crash data. Windows crashed 8% of sessions, with win2k at 4%, NT4 at 3%, XP at 12%.
Average users also print 10 pages of paper per day. 3-4 prints are made on a local printer, with the rest on a networked printer.
95% of boxes were running Windows, with win2k installed on 42% of desktops. NT4 is at 16%, and XP is in use in 2% of desktops.
The study concludes by suggesting thin-clients, using open-source and rationalizing licensing arrangements, and increasing the length between upgrades both for hardware and software.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Box lasts 20 minutes a breakdown of the data
I think this should be on every computer shop wall, what do you say?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I seriously doubt the accuracy of those stats. We're talking about this now in the office and none of us can even remember the last time one our boxes actually had to be rebooted due to a crash (or some other major problem with windows). The only reason I ever need to reboot is to install things which require rebooting (usually OS patches or updates to our source code control system).
12%? No way... Maybe if you hand it out to a bunch of clueless idiots who wrote down on their test form that they had to reboot - when really, they simply didn't know of the proper way to fix the problem. I bet if you ran the same tests for advanced users like software developers, you'd find that they hardly ever had to reboot to fix a problem. I think I only reboot once a month or so. My XP box I'm writing this on has been up for more than 2 weeks. It last went down for reboot when I installed SP2.
If ask a bunch of newbie 18 year old students to use a linux box for a year, you'll probably find that many of them will reinstall the entire operating system a couple of times during the year if something goes slightly wrong with it (not to mention many many reboots). It's not because there's something wrong with linux that requires it to be reinstalled - it's only because when you're learning - it's often the quickest and easiest way to fix a problem if there's no one around to help. This goes for any OS. I don't think those results are statistically significant.
Get the new PC, get Windows installed, get the updates, plug the modem in and halfway through the driver install the machine would reboot. Three times I went through this. I tried the Windows native driver, the driver on the disk, and the driver from the manufacturer's website.
Note that the modem came with XP drivers and did not come with Linux ones!
After hearing for years how Linux is always playing catchup in device support, it was a sort of nice surprise to find a device that worked flawlessly on Linux and was beyond hope on XP.
I always log out of KDE at the end of the session (*), but my machine (home-office workstation) normally stays up until it has to be hardware-serviced or I want to upgrade the kernel. I maxed this in about 100 days. X never locked me up badly, at least not since Xfree 3.1 or (ie, a long time ago).
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
i think someone conveniantly left off some zeros....
Crashing and requiring a reboot are two different things. I use XP at work too. I have ZERO spyware on it. It is for work, I use it for work only. No button bars, no cute apps. The only thing I use personally on it are Opera, PuTTY, and an old version of Winamp. I have to reboot about twice a week.
If people need to reboot 12% of the time, then they are doing something wrong. It's not the OS, but more the user in my opinion. XP is a stable system, and does a good job of keeping my machines running.
I have a good idea why my system needs to be rebooted, it is some of the apps I run - mainly certain Rational tools. Sure, on Win98 it would blue screen and crash. XP will just slow to a near halt or start behaving very oddly. Reboots are part of Microsoft OS maintenance. If there is a problem with your machine - reboot. SOP, everywhere I have been.
Even if XP is stable, if it allows applications to bring it down and make it unusable, then the PC isn't stable - period. If the OS can't control it, then it is the fault of the OS.
Hey, I have problems at home on my Linux machine too. Apps will cause X to freak out, and I have had to reboot because I don't know how to cleanly shutdown X remotely or from a console. I am sure there is a way, it just happens so infrequently I haven't bothered to find out. Sometimes Opera will crash X, or if I am messing around with settings on Mplayer, it will freeze it. I used to have problems with my Xfs (font server) crashing all the time, but that was on my old system (Redhat 7.3). I think that may have caused some of the problems with Opera freaking out. I just upgraded to Mandrake 10.0 a few weeks ago, so hopefully that is all straightened out. But my uptime at home is usually VERY long. Not to start comparing, but it usually gets rebooted only when the power goes out or something. In fact, my web server has been up since the last power hit, 118 days ago. Before that, it was up over 230. :-)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
But the slashdot editorial said that 8% of Windows session requires a reboot. How is that automatically translated into a windows failure? It could be an application or driver install for one thing. It could be unrelated software, such as spyware or a worm, that is causing the reboot. Again, I can't read the article, and the translation is poor, and doesn't quite mention failures (I skimmed it cuz it sucked) as the only cause for the reboots listed. So I'd go out on a limb and say this is another blatant attempt at propaganda like slashdot editorial.
Ok, so I know someone will post and say "Well, if Windows did not have the security flaw in the first place, it wouldn't have happened.". And my reply to that is, if you're driving your car and you get hit with a bazooka round, are you going to go complain to Ford that it wasn't designed to survive bazooka rounds, and that your car doesn't drive anymore? Sure I'm exgerating a bit, but it's basically a malicious attack that circumvents security, or exploits a flaw. Note: I'm not apologizing for Microsoft's poor attempt at security, I recongnize that it needs vast improvement. But the blame for a reboot caused by a malicious piece of code does not rest on Microsoft's shoulders alone. ESPECIALLY if there is an update that addresses that particular flaw already.
From a statistical perspective, I'd like to see the user population groups, and the causality of the reboots before you go saying that Windows fails 8% of the time. I wonder if the data is even normal.
I'd also like to see a similar study done on other operating systems, and see if the means of required reboots (not failures) are statistically different between operating systems. They likely are, but who knows for sure?
As in 100% - 12%?
...and my sessions are typically a month long, or whenever Critical Updates are released.
I even go into suspend mode every night. XP Pro, properly configured, with brand-name hardware and WHQL drivers, has never crashed for me.
Caveat: it crashed when I used nVidia's tweak utility to overzealously set my memory timings faster. The whole machine went toes up until I reset the CMOS.
The plural or anecdote is not data, however using the stat of "% of 'sessions' ending in reboot" is not remotely useful as a guage of stability.
Just wondering why your company made the switch. Were the old systems not able to do the tasks you need, a new program you needed, or what? And tangentially, what has been the ramification from switching and now having less reliable machines? any heads roll over the decision?
They are so used to running away when things get roguh, they probably reboot everytime a dialog box pops up... and start learning German.
I'm not saying I'm a professional translator (I'm not :-) but maybe this translation by hand will make more sense than the Fish. Expect lots of typos and such, still, I wrote it in a hurry. My personal comments are in brackets. Enjoy ! Or not.
28 % of office time dedicated to Internet and e-mail, 2 % to Excel
What do employees do on their computers ? It is that thorny question that a study lead by Microcost -- in partnership with Acadys -- tries to answer. An investigation which goal isn't to monitor users but rather wishes to lay the foundations of a rethinking about rationalizing costs of managing large computer installations.
Over a month, 1 285 500 workstations were scanned in a thousand enterprises distributed in 7 European countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, England, Italy).
First finding, a user spends on average two hours and fifteen minutes per day on his workstation. He dedicates more than a quarter (28 %) of this time to the Internet/e-mail couple. As for the rest, office applications, business applications and Windows Explorer take respectively 17 %, 14 % and 9 % of an employee's used time. The office application's 17 % is further subdivised in 15 % for word processing and 2 % for Excel [I just can't understand why word processing was generalized while spreadsheets seems in the journalist's opinion to be Excel's exclusive domain -- Translator's note].
A business has thus an interest in modifying its software licence policy according to different use patterns, to avoid paying for a complete office suite if the main tool to be used is the word processor [Well, I suppose you could use OpenOffice.org for the rest. You could even use it for the word processor, in fact -- Translator's note]. According to the study, 10 software packages grab 67 % of uses [I'm not sure if he speaks about different uses or usage time -- Tr. note]. These numbers even go up to 89 % in the industrial sector, while they drop to 42 % in services-oriented businesses.
In addition to software usage data, the AMI software (from which the informations gathered for the study were originated) allows to obtain numbers regarding the reliance of Microsoft's Operating Systems. For instance, the average failure rate requiring a system reboot has been measured at about 8 % per session. These numbers dramatically fluctuate according to the considered Windows version. So, Windows 2000 has a 4 % failure rate and NT 4 has 3 % [This must be total BS, I've never seen such a crash-prone system than NT4 except Win9x -- Tr. note], while Windows XP is around 12 %.
Last, the study reveals employees' habits with regard to printing. The paperless office isn't poised to arrive soon, since 10 pages per user are printed on average in a day. These are distributed in 3 or 4 printing commands of which half are directed to local printers, while the other half goes to network printers. Still, if the printing cost drops to a few Eurocents when printing is done on a network printer, it's multiplied by five when it's done on a local printer, because of printer supplies' prices.
Also of note, unsurprisingly 95 % of workstations are fitted with a Windows environment, the Win2000 version being predominant in professional use. Present on 42 % of workstations, this version has largely replaced NT4, which claims now only 16 %. As to Windows XP, it struggles to find its audience, especially in industrial settings, 83 % of whom opted for Windows 2000. Only services-oriented business have 5 % of their computer installations running on Windows XP, while the total average is around 2 %.
Beyond all these numbers, the consulting company recommends several solutions to CTOs to rationalize their computer installations. Among these good practices reminders, the company successively points to thin clients, Open Source Software [I wonder if there's anyone except Microsoft who won't mention FLOSS these days -- Tr. note], licence management optimization, and longer periods between renewing the installed computers' hardware as well as their software.
Xenu brings order!
Oh well. And 100% of all sessions require a shutdown! Pure craze! Now, this Windows thing must be stopped!
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
I'm a heavy user of XP pro, I run many and varied apps, and while I experience the occasional application crash I have to say I'm usually pretty impressed at how well XP handles it - I can't even remember the last time I had to reboot XP for anything like that. I'd suggest a lot of this is down to people just being clueless about setting windows up properly, rather than the OS itself
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
Many people reboot just because an app has gotten itself in some sort of an indeterminant state but hasn't fully unloaded. This happens to me all of the time with Lotus Notes. The damned thing will crash, but leave remnant processes hanging that keep me from launching Notes again.
Sure, I know how to go into the process manager and kill the zombie processes, but most of the people around here reboot when this happens. It happens quite frequently.
When a windows session runs long enough, eventually, it slows down so much that you have to reboot, anyway. With 98, this timeframe was, roughly, 48 hours. Windows ME lasted about ten minutes. XP can reliably stay up for about a week. Of course, within that week, 38 new worms/viruses have been released.
I'd love to see the 'reliability' of Linux or Mac OS X. I mean, look at slashdot: uptime: 79 days, 7:33, 1 user. Sure, maybe 2000 in a production environment can do that. Or 2003 Advanced Server, but I have general-use Linux boxen that say the same thing. We had a few at work that just turned a year old. Let's see ANY Windows OS do that.
Informatus Technologicus
I've seen only two crashes here. One when tryig to install a old win 98 "WDM" driver, the other when usign a non-safe SMP version of a winmodem. AFAIK, Windows XP "core" is just damn stable. Main problemas are drivers, like ie: Nvidia drivers (they're know to be to most common cause of hangs under windows XP...) in short: those stadistics suck. Windows is quite stable, the 3rd party drivers are not.
Couldn't agree more with garcia. Windows 95/98 sucked and crashed all the time. Once I started using NT in '98 then 2000, now XP I have a system that is rock solid. My laptop with all sorts of crazy stuff on it runs XP and I haven't rebooted it, well since installing SP2, but prior to that, I go for weeks at a time with no reboot. My PC running 2000 has been up and running for 84 days with no reboot and the reboot before that was caused by a power outage. Sorry, no UPS. I have another PC running Mandrake and is stable too, but no more stable than my 2000 or XP boxes. Time to quit spinning MS for their products. As a company they might seem dictatorial which bleeds onto their products, their products are solid. I can't remember the last time IE rendered a page poorly. While I love and use Firefox, there are plenty of pages that look crappy on it (probably the page not conforming to the consortium, but IE displays them fine), WMP works great, Office is worlds better than StarOffice or OpenOffice, Developer studio is great.
Just as sick of hearing about how bad IE is and insecure. Perhaps it might be that a tiny fraction of people use other browsers, and once said browsers become more popular then they will be focused on by attackers. Everyone raises a stink when IE has leaky JPEGs, but it isn't as criticized when FireFox has same such leaks. Time to get over it.
Of the reboots that were done how many could be avoided by knowing how to get out of what caused the lockup? I know that the average user just does a reboot to get the problem solved when ending a task might get them out of a jam.
I make computer games. :-)
Technically I get a failure after every session. I never reboot (at home or work) unless there is a failure. Those failures may be weeks apart, but they are failures that terminate sessions. If they are harvesting info from 1.2M computers there is no way that they are analyzing the cause of the failure. I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't investigate the cause of the reboot or the uptime before the reboot. (The areticle mentions neither) Allow me to propose a different scenario for Windows. One more like mine. Most PC users at work happily go about their day and shut down their computer at the end of it. They experience a failure maybe 1/50 days. People like me push their computer to do alot and never reboot it. I experience a failure 1/1 times, but only every 7 days. Others genuinely have problems with their pc and when they reboot their system fails immediately upon restart creating a higher than average or 10/10 failures in a single day. All of these come out to 8% failures. I did no math here...just guessing on the average.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
What **** did that moderator think of. That windows is only one with bad drivers?
With current discussion. I made my mistake of ASSUMING something that was common enough would have stable linux drivers. I just was made unlucky purchase of something common enough that HAD to have stable linux drivers. And result was it wasnt stable! Yes thats the problem, bad drivers happen in other systems than windows too! [ATI,via...] On the other hand I'll probably buy a grafix card when I can afford one, and that'll have stable drivers.
JollyFinn
Ps. I won't have windows on my box EVEN if 1/2 the time starting X will kill the machine.
sysrq don't work its SO bad crash.
Pps. I won't reveal the manufacturer because I don't wan't advertise anyone so I call it, geeks nViagra.
Emacs is good operating system, but it has one flaw: Its text editor could be better.
...makes this number go up to around 70-90% :)
If every a story itself was a troll this one is it. I hate Windows too but the story is misleading as Taco refers to it. It only 8% of windows FAILURES need rebooting as the solution not an 8% failure rate.
I run both Linux and Windows desktops. I reboot about one every two weeks and then usually it is because I've installed a patch or program that requires a reboot to work. In general most of my apps that I run are stable and I get rid of those that aren't.
X-Windows crashes more often for me the MS Windows does. But at least all I have to do for X is restart the X server. MS Windows I do have to reboot. Both are a pain but a full reboot is more painful.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Ok enough with the clueless masses and XP "tards" comments.
I can not for the life of me figure out why its the consumers fault that their OS allows BY DEFAULT virtually any "developer, developer, developer" to dump, install bomb their system with just about anything and for some reason its their fault.
So if I have a house built for me and the builder gives all the other developers, developers, developers, the same keys and they in turn give those keys to other users and those users routinely enter my newly built house and break my televison, unplug my radio and turn the lights on and off... it MUST BE MY FAULT!
Ok Bill!
...National Geographic confirms that bears do indeed crap in the woods.
Never have a process go so down hill that you couldn't login to the box to kill it?
I've left to find myself. If you happen to see me, please, keep me there until I return.
In re-reading I didn't really say that right, but stand by what I meant to say.
Windows XP is, in my experience, much more stable than 2000. I've seen 2000 bluescreen plenty of times. XP notsomuch.
Separate thought: what can make XP unstable is bad drivers and bad hardware. They will take down XP in a heartbeat. But how can you hold Microsoft responsible for supporting every peripheral ever made?
From my experience I've noticed that windows Xp tend to be somewhat more delicate than win2000 or win NT 4 on the same hardware. You if you keep the system update and intall just a bunch of microsoft programs, everything it's just fine. But once you set up a network, begin installing service packs and custom software... dunno why, everything simply blows up. Or slows down to a crawl. It doesn't happen all the time, but sometimes it does. Having tons and tons of services left on by default doesn't help either. Fact is, I run all of my machines on Xp, but I'm not as happy with it as I should be. Some examples? A fresh new install of Xp pro Sp1 on a new notebook gave a "file in use" error when trying to activate hybernation in the control panel. Windows update onto another machine simply stopped working. The install/uninstall section gives wierd results and sometimes simply can't uninstall things.. I don't know, I don't want to be a MS basher, but to me WinXP has some definitely strange attitudes and is lickely prone to failures. At least more than its NT predecessors.
Unsurprisingly, 95% of the clients surveyed use some version of Windows, Windows 2000 being the most prevalent in a company setting. In 42% of these environments, Windows 2000 has replaced NT 4 (which now only takes about 16% of Windows installations). As for Windows XP, its trying to find a way into the markey, notably in industrial environments, where Windows 2000 makes up 83%. Only 5% of the service industries use Windows XP, while the general public uses about 2%.
AccountKiller
I run Windows XP at work, I've been running it since early 2002. The 12% figure seems artificially high to me. Yes, XP does fail but by my estimate it only seems to fail on me once a month or so. That would be about 3% of the time by my calculations. Windows 2000 was comparable, maybe twice a month it would freeze up enough to require a reboot.
:)
:) One notorious box I had to repair took 45 minutes to load due to the sheer number of stupid apps the user had loading up (stock quotes, desktop weather, a dancing fish, Gator, football score app, etc. etc.... what a waste).
Windows 98 (not SE) was less than this, I only rebooted my Windows 98 box every 2-3 months. About 2.5% of the time in that case. Windows 95 crashed 3 or 4 times a day
So, if you factor in adding patches, I maybe loose 1 hour of work per month due to faults with the OS.
I think the main reason my Windows boxes stay fairly stable is because I don't install a great deal of software on them. I only install Office (Microsoft), A virus scanner, Gaim, Firefox, Thunderbird and a few apps I need for my job. I also keep up to date on patches, and do housekeeping tasks like keeping my disks defragmented.
Most of the unstable Windows boxes I've seen are the ones that have been overloaded with a ridiculous number of apps, most of them the silly ones that come on cereal packets
I'm not saying Windows doesn't have its flaws (I think everyone would be happy to forget Me!), but if used sensibly it's not *that* unreliable.
As a comparison, my Linux servers have maintained a 100% uptime so far as crashes are concerned. The only thing that's knocked them out in the last 12 months has been due to Hurricanes. My Linux desktop (KDE), however, crashes about once every 2 months. So, from a desktop perspective at least, Linux is about as reliable as Windows XP.
I don't personally see a stability difference between XP and 2k in my own use at work or home currently.
I must be either lucky, or there is something that users are doing on their XP machines that is causing this 12% "failure rate."
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Anyone who has to reboot Windows during 8% of their sessions really needs to find someone who knows what they're doing to set up their box for them.
Windows (especially XP) is damned stable if set up right.
-ANY- OS is damned unstable if not set up right.
I'm running debian sarge (on the server I'm typing this from now), installed via Mepis (but its no longer Mepis), and other than a handful of unstable packages that still haven't been migrated to testing, the system is a pure Sarge system.
I don't have any issues with X, I don't have any crashes. I have only shutdown about 4 times since mid to late August when I installed the system. The only issue I've had is failure of konqueror due to changing networking settings to configure a router, then changing back, and not being able to figure out why I can no longer ping a specific (other) computer, yet I can ping the original router at the network edge. This is due to a lack of knowledge/experience on my part, not a failure of the OS. In this case, rebooting restored everything, but I'm sure it could have been fixed without rebooting.
The only issues I've had in the last year have been konqueror occasionally crashing, but I have a method of avoiding the crash (on a different desktop), so it isn't really an issue anymore. I can't remember anything else crashing on me lately, and this includes an old install of Suse 7.3, a desktop running from Knoppix disk for more than a year (with persistant home, writeable partitions, etc.).
All of the sessions last for months at a time, unless I shut down for noise control on occasion.
Checking my main desktop (knoppix running from cdrom, logging in from the server I'm on now), I get:
$ uptime 10:37:46 up 24 days, 17:34, 1 user, load average: 0.30, 0.06, 0.02
And the last time it was shutdown, was because I got fed up with the noise (13 fans, 6 hard drives/raid, large tower). The next time I shut it down will be in the next few days, after I burn the latest versions of knoppix and mepis, so I can immediately update what I'm running, and hopefully finally get something installed to hard drive (mepis used to install Sarge).
You're having problems with crashes? It's a problem with your install, or your hardware. Maybe a memory problem. But it isn't a problem with the OS, unlike the Windows situation.
XP having more problems than NT? Bears out what I'm hearing. More problems than 2000? Not hearing enough on this point, as it seems a lot of companies are skipping 2000 and going from NT to XP, at least from what I'm hearing. And from what else I'm hearing? Linux is making a great replacement for NT, and MCSEs that I've been telling to get Linux and get certified/experience (repeatedly) are eager to tell me how a Linux install hasn't need to be rebooted in so long or since install, and then I remind them I'm the one who told them to get Linux/training.
As for 2000, from what I see on a local lug list, it has its problems also, as the admins on the list aren't jumping to XP since they have a policy of not installing the latest release (and take it to an extreme with Unix and similar, installing versions of Oracle and Solaris that are at a minimum two releases older than the latest stable release.
Your problem is exactly that, your problem, not a problem with Linux.
No, really? In my experience (and this is where everyone will argue over) win2k pro is much much more stable on computers that I have seen than winxp.
If we come right down to reasons for this its probably down to the users. XP is targetted at home users who generally go out of their way to make machines unstable. There should be little difference between 2k and XP, and I would really think in reality that they are both ultra stable. The 1000x more stable is really overdoing it.
I mean, Linux is a commodity OS with a patchy history and no special attention paid to high availability. My own experience with Linux is that it's maybe average for low-end UNIX these days. But even "average" means "multi-year uptimes are not unusual".
If a company is running systems that have to remain up, they're going to run an OS designed for the job. A real high-availability system like Non-Stop can handle OS upgrades without downtime, and the expected uptime of an installation is the same as the lifetime of the installation: it's booted when it's installed and it runs until it's replaced.
Real-time control systems have similar requirements, though at the high end you have two live systems running lockstep so one can take over from the next, and they can be brought down for plant refurbishments (after they've cleanly brought the process to a safe halt).
The loss of placekeeping is a significant costs that businesses and individuals bear using such crappy software. Every day, every employee has to wait for their computer to boot and then must redo all of their previous navigation to open all of the information they need to complete whatever task they are working on. The boot itself takes five to ten minutes, depending on what kind of virus protection is used. Depending on the complexity of the company's data systems, and most are a nightmare of legacy junk, getting started can take about 1/2 hour. That's like the company throwing away 6% of of it's salary budget. I can compare that to uptime with Debian unstable that's on the order of months and Debian testing and stable uptimes that last longer than the electricity to my house.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Let's have some fun with a simulated SAT question!
Windows 2000 is to Windows XP as:Most people reboot their Windoze computers once a day and only call for help when they can't keep it up that long. The statistics reflect what people will put up with and have learned to deal with to get their work done.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Yeah. Windows fails 100% of the time.
....come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. 14% of people know that.
Lots of fanboys. That's the only thing I can think of. Because the article is about 1000 companies, which aren't home users. And yet, you, NinjaGuy, and a lot of other posts are going on and on about home users.
/.'ers defending their use of Microsoft products, when I read your posts, not /.'ers looking at the problems objectively. Blaming the user for reboots (especially when it doesn't apply in this article's context) only makes your arguments weaker, not stronger.
And something else that is being ignored, lack of patching. When you patch, you reboot. Virus/trojans/malware/spyware is another excuse, though attributed to home users. Again, 1000 companies. And, if viruses, trojans, malware are causing reboots, then it is still a reboot. If it could've been fixed without rebooting, the point is, it wasn't. In 1000 companies, not home users.
You've got to call it like it is, not like you want it to be. Because otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves, since you'll be preaching to the choire, not convincing someone who is trying to look at the problem objectively. All I see is
The first step is always admitting you have a problem. Often that's the biggest step. If you like Microsoft products that much, then hopefully Longhorn will fulfill your dreams. I hope it does. Because competition is good, for everyone.
I leave the machine up UNTIL it needs to be rebooted to de-kludge the system... So in my case, I guess it's 100%. :P
Sadly the time between reboots is terribly short... God I hate windows... Someone port Lightwave, Adobe CS, and Macromedia Studio MX to Linux! T_T
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
I installed the SP2 upgrade on my notebook yesterday, then spent about 6 hours trying to get it not to lock up my computer, then spent an hour in safe mode watching Add/Remove Programs clean it the hell out.
At least Microsoft got that part of it right. My notebook again operates as it did before the upgrade. I hope...
Let's see: XP released 2001; SP2 rolls out 2004. ~1.5 years between service packs. SP6 will be out between 2010-2015, but I'll be too busy fighting with beta Longhorn and won't have time to install it. Microsoft has 50K people devoted to bringing you the next worst OS on the planet. Switch, please! Choose Linux. Choose Mac OS X. Do something nonconformal.
I know a guy so reprobate he muses about the day he'll get off Win98 and gets a copy of NT. What's my witty retort now?
X windows crashes far, far more often than MS-Windows.
But, since X-windows is a layered userspace app, you just restart the failed bits and soldier on, while the rest of the machine continues to work just fine.
So, the big difference is that while Xwindows is "less reliable" (for certain values of the word "reliable") it doesn't make you restart compiles 96 hours into the job because your email client crashed.
Tip for the boneheads posting here who are rebooting their machines when X-windows fails: RTFM meta-keys, ssh, ps -aef, and kill.
What's ironic is that I need WinXP and Visual Stupidity^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Studio .NET for my computer animation class (homogenous testing and development environment blah blah). To ensure as few porting problems as possible I went to the Academic Alliance and got XP and VS.NET for free. Knowing about security I immeidately removed my network cable before the install (SP1a) and afterwards put Norton Internet Security on the machine.
So far so good. Then I had to disable the firewall to install SP2 and I was hit by 25 different worms in less than a minute. (I'm on a university network with uncleaned masses). I then smelled the good electrical smell as my box locked up.
Immediately powering down and opening up the case to inspect the hardware I found my primary hard drive was a smoldering piece of scrap metal. Which I took out to replace with the 10 gb drive from an old computer that was collecting dust (thank god my data drive wasn't touched).
So now here I am a day later with Mandrake only on my computer. I would like to thank MS for showing me where the far superior products are. (B0rk project 1 games ruined, b0rk 2 data drive fvcked over by XP, b0rk 3 hardware damaged, b0rk 4 not gonna happen).
Good programmers drink beer to relieve job stress.
Great programmers drink hard liquor and work best hungover.
Running an apache web server on a barebones linux box is very different from playing Doom 3 on an XP box with an Audigy soundcard and ATi 9800 Pro while also streaming iTunes over the network, etc etc...
OK, how about this? The uptime is low because we had a long-term power outage last week, but...
09:56 up 7 days, 17:31, 80 users, load average: 2.09, 2.31, 2.42
Going through the PS output, that's 13 remote window managers and 5 VNC sessions (that's like 18 "windows terminal server" sessions), the rest are telnetted in. that's a fairly typical server load.
Maybe now top managers who can realy understand numbers do realise that migration from Windows XP to Linux will bring immediate increase in productivity by 12%.
There you are, staring at me again.
My RH 7.1 box at work seemingly lives forever; I've rebooted the machine for "therapeutic" reasons after 180 days' uptime.
...)
My RH WS3 box on the other hand wants a reboot every few weeks. It doesn't crash, it doesn't lock out but it slowly becomes sluggish (99+ % idle time, ever increasing load,
I power down my other linux boxen when I'm done, so I never clock an uptime longer than a few hours.
OTOH, the laptop running XP has never crashed on me yet.
Is there a legible version somewhere?
Plain and simple, there is no way XP is "1000 times as stable" as Win2k. It's not even *more* stable than win2k. I have been using Win2k for a very long time, and I am still waiting for XP to be good enough to switch. There are a few features of XP that I'd like to use, but I'm not willing to give up the stability of my 2000 box.
Now, upon what are you basing the assertion that XP is 1000 more stable than Win2K? My understanding is that both have a similar kernel design / driver interface. In fact, many Win2K drivers work fine on XP and vice-versa. It seems probable that Win2K is actually *more* stable, since it has had longer to mature and has had more service packs. Granted, most of those fixes have probably gone into XP, too, but the newer features of XP may not be as clean.
I have to agree with you about drivers in general, however. They are pretty much the only thing that has ever caused me problems with Win2k / XP. The one thing about XP that seems worse is its scheduler, which seems to lock up the system occasionally for about 5-10 seconds while using explorer.
Maybe you meant 2000/XP are 1000 times more stable than Me/98? Because that makes a great deal of sense. 2000 has never been considered an unstable OS, IMO, by those who know how to use it. XP simply continues the tradition, although I think it has dropped back a bit.
-Dan
What the hell are you doing if you run 96-hour compiles and your machine is strong enough to run X-windows at the same time?
Are you on crack?
I've discovered that many Windows users don't even know what "reboot" means, they do it so often. They think that "reboot" means reinstalling the operating system. The idea that there is a computer that doesn't have to be continually turned on and off blows their minds.
I'm prepared to concede that a 12% reboot rate in XP is probably in part a result of poor administration, poor virus checking, etc. But it is nevertheless unacceptable - isn't the whole point of Windows supposed to be that it is easy to use and easy to administer? Isn't that why it's supposed to better than UNIX?
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
2k moved the GDI into the executive
It was NT4 that did that.
I kept a couple servers running NT3.51 to the bitter end because early NT4 versions were so bad. Later ones were better, but I don't think they ever retruned to the level of NT3.51.
There are so many more important reasons why Windows Sucks(tm).
OK, here is a shocking newsflash: computers crash. Now don't get me wrong - I believe that computers _can_ be nearly crash-proof. But the practical side of this is the same as the proverbial dog chasing his tail: you try, and you can make progress, but you can never quite get there. That doesn't diminish the goal, though.
Some OS's are closer to this goal than others, and it sucks that Windows, despite its popularity, is such a loser in this respect. But I think we are barking up the wrong tree here.
What about user interface problems, such as consistency, redundancy, confusion, and errors?
What about speed?
What about security?
Maybe because it remains rather difficult to decisively pin these concepts down, making it easier to grab ahold of the simpler concept of crashing to serve as our official Windows Sucks(tm) torch.
If these numbers are correct and based on my experience, I would think XP would have a failure rate much closer to zero. Granted, I run the professional edition and obviously know what I am doing when it comes to computers, so mine isn't junked up, but even my family's computer running home has proved to be very stable.
SIGFAULT
Microsoft has never attempted to pass the 99.999% reliable test and become telecom carrier grade.
This prevents Microsoft from going into many Datacenters especially in telecom companies. There are versions of Linux and embedded Linux that are certified telecom carrier grade.
In my experience apps in winXP DONT take the OS with it, they just crash out and leave you back at the desktop or whatever. The only instable 3rd party things that would kill the OS completely were shit drivers (Kyro II video cards notably)
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Now, I can't read the article so I don't know if this has been addressed or not, but how long are these sessions? In comparing my win2k use to my winxp use, XP halts on me more often, but I stay logged into it a lot longer. A much more useful and interesting metric would be forced reboots per day.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If,
NT4 is 4%
Windows 2000 is 8%
and XP is 12%
then what, pray tell is the failure rate of Windows ME?
I'm afraid to find out.
And, where is the notice?
I left my desk for a few hours today. There's two machines on it. One slackware, the other WinME (NOT my choice!)
When I came back, the WinME comp's screen was completely gray and it showed no signs of life. 'nuff said.
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
"Windows users obviously have a different expectation of "stable" from Linux users."
I've been saying this for YEARS!
A Windows user will say "uptime" and mean "time since I had a blue screen" but will NOT count the daily / weekly / whatever reboots they perform.
If Windows starts to go sluggish, they reboot. But they do NOT consider that a break in their "uptime" NOR do they consider that a crash.
# uptime
08:34:13 up 115 days, 18:12, 1 user, load average: 0.10, 0.04, 0.01
That's because I had to move it a few months ago. Everything is current except the latest kernel.
Now I just KNOW I'll see posts from Windows users talking about their "uptime" and so on. But too many of the Windows patches require reboots. Here are the scenarios:
#1. Unpatched Windows box with high uptime.
#2. Patched Windows box with low uptime.
#3. User who does not understand uptime.
4, 8 & 12% of what?
my Windows 2k box at work has been running since (thinks about when the last power outage was) May... so am I to be expecting it to be out of commision now for 15 days really soon?
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Fun stuff! I'd love to get in that biz too...
...180 days of uninterrupted uptime pretty much means 180 days without system patches and updates. Unless, of course, you've found a way to patch your system (not the applications, the system) without requiring a reboot.
Going half a year without system updates or patches may seem l33t, but at some point you're just asking for trouble. Personally, if my boxes were up for more than about 30-45 days straight, I'd start thinking about organizing a system update with necessary reboot. YMMV, of course, as I like to stay on the safer side when it comes to stuff like this.
RTFA (Yes, it's French. That's no excuse.). They measured how frequently during a working session (that is, between powerup and powerdown-because-done) a typical office PC was restarted.
if you consider the install base. No, really. Think about it. The size of the install base, the population of machines surveyed... That's actually not too bad.
from the article:
During one month, 1,285,500 working stations were scanned...
That's a big population. And these were stations using custom in-house software, complex industrial apps, and such. That means these weren't necessarily common users, common apps, or very common environments.
[signature]
I turn my computer on in the morning when I get to work and off when I leave work. Win98SE usually crashed once a day, but WinXP has only crashed 4 or 5 times in the last year. A BIG improvement.
I do a lot of gaming at home, Win98SE used to crash a lot on certain games, now with the same hardware XP hardly ever crashes. Plus load times are much better too.
XP is a bit bloated in it's default config, but turn off system restore and all that junk and it's a very good OS.
Was this study funded by Microsoft?
Is Microsoft going to use this in its Get The Facts campaign?
Sorry, I couldn't be bothered to RTFA.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
People aren't going to change their habits that much, nor should we - we're important, and the computers are incidental. Other OS'es don't crash as much as XP, like the still-popular Windows 2000. If Microsoft spent more of its time and profits on stabilizing the execution, perhaps at the cost of protecting its monopoly in court and in the market, things would be better for people. Only philosophers can say whether less rebooting is better for the computer.
--
make install -not war
The relevant quote (translated from french) is:
Yeah, when I have to reboot, I often have to say, "oh, please excuse my French".
Table-ized A.I.
About a year and a half ago my dad's boss wanted me to set up a network for them in their office. Basically, they had an old computer in the office and had been using dial-up. Well, they got a brand new computer from Dell and weanted to network them together and get broadband.
When I arrived they hadn't even opened the box with the Dell in it, so I got it out and hooked it up and everything (except for plugging the network card into the network). I pushed the power button and it started to go through the usual new Dell and then blue screened for no apparent reason at all.
I mean, no one touched anything at all. It started up and then without even touching the mouse or keyboard, BSOD. Upon a reboot it was fine. No idea why on earth a brand new computer would do that on the first boot.
My personal experience with windows is that XP has failed the least amount of times, and Win2k the most (I never used Win NT... i used win98 which failed even more times than 2k)
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
If an application misbehaves it generally causes Explorer to freeze or not respond (not IE, but the shell, Explorer). Most of the time you can just restart Explorer and regain control.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Load Avg: 1.30, 1.98, 0.71 Uptime: 168 d 5 hr 33 min 7 s I'm running Mac OS 10.3 Server, on my G4 450 dual processor machine (Waaaay below spec) with half a gig of ram, and a few hundred gigs of hard drives. Load averages so high because i'm doing some work in photoshop at the moment. I think we had a powercut 168 days ago.... (Windows 2k bluescreened on me ten minutes ago while playing morrowind)
My UID is prime. Is yours?
I don't log out of my computers, at home or at work, ever. My Windows box and my Sun Ray stay logged in all the time, just locked when I'm not at them. So a session is literally until the box is rebooted either for a patch cluster on the Sun Ray server or a new driver on the Windows box, whatever.
Basically, 100% of my sessions end in a reboot since there's no reason to log out.
Now if you mean number of reboots due to crashes? Well that's next to zero, in either case. My Windows box hasn't crashed since I started working here, and the Sun Ray has gone down only once (which wasn't a crash really, so much as the admin doing something he shouldn't have).
The whole "session" thing seems to be a bad measurement to me since I can't really figure out what they mean by it.
I'm surprised to hear so many people agree with this study. You'd think the slashdot crowd would be able to keep a simple OS like Windows XP from constantly crashing. If 12% of your sessions end in a reboot, you're doing something wrong.
The irritation rate is better than 98% MTB
The article is total BS. I've been using XP for years and had to reboot less than 20 times during that period thanks to hibernation mode
I think UNIX people get way too over excited about big uptime numbers. Yes, on a server this matters. But how Windows functions as a server is a whole different debate from how Windows functions as a desktop. It doesn't matter if you have to reboot your desktop machine once every 2-4 weeks. Interestingly enough, the people in our office that use Linux seem to reboot their Linux desktops at least that often for various reasons.
Also I'd argue that X crashing or hanging is the same thing as needing a reboot from a user perspective. Why? Because it interrupted all their work and requires a reload. Doesn't matter that the kernel stayed up, the system still went down from their perspective. Most users would just reboot the system anyhow, rather than trying to diagnose what went wrong.
Heck that's why we recommend reboots here at work to fix problems. Let's say someone has a printer problem. Maybe the spooler hung, maybe there is a zombied process (Windows gets those too) causing problems who knows? Well I could go up there, spend 5-30 minutes finding what is wrong and fixing it, or I could tell them to reboot the system which will fix the problem. Given that a reboot on their desktop doesn't matter it is a more efficient use of my, and their, time to just do that.
Windows NT came out in 1993.
Windows XP came out in 2001.
It is now late 2004.
Windows XP is the latest in a chain of operating systems starting with Windows NT.
If XP isn't stable now, maybe they shouldn't have added all that extra chrome in the first place? (If that is even the reason for the stability problems; I'm not convinced!)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I develop a product for a desktop system that's tightly managed in terms of software that's installed, user's rights are sharply curtailed, and the system is on an isolated network. The OS is Windows NT 4.0 Workstation with Service Pack 6a.
8% sounds kinda high to me. These systems, while they have their faults (mostly related to access of the DVD burner causing Explorer to hang or pause for extended periods), they're pretty damn solid.
In a tightly-controlled environment, even NT 4.0 can be well-behaved.
On the other hand, in "the wild", I have not yet seen a Windows system, even XP, that survives on it's own for longer than a month or two, and after that, the owner better be tech savvy, and not afraid to do OS reinstalls. Worms, Adware, Spyware, bad user habits, and just plain crappy commercial software, are all just a bit more than a typical Windows OS installation can handle.
What brings me to even post this entry is just that in my prior years of experience, Windows was always just a piece of crap. I dealt with it on a daily basis. But in the past two years, when I changed jobs, I found that you CAN engineer a safe sandbox, in which Windows can actually be reliable and useful.
I freely admit that my situation represents probably less than one one-hundredth of one percent of all Windows systems out there. But there it is. My point is, that saying "8% of all Windows Sessions Crash" is stupid. It depends on the environment, and the user, and the situation.
I can't really compare to Linux, because I don't have a whole lot of experience with Linux in "the wild". But I can say that Mac OS X is an order of magnitude more stable and robust, with minimal intervention by a tech-savvy admin.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Now yes I've had lots of programs crash. Anarchy Online has crashed 19 times in the past two days alone. But I've NEVER had Windows XP or 2000 crash. Ever. Out of probably thousands of bootups. Even my Windows 98 system was crash-free for over 3 years of solid use. Obviously if you're a noob using Windows you'll make the system crash all over from spyware, etc... but then again, if you're a noob in linux and click no/yes on all the wrong dialogues, you'll get the same :)
but my Windows machine locked up.
Windows... Windows... oh yeah, isn't that the operating system made by Microsoft in Redmond? You mean there are still people out there using that crappy, crash-prone, virus/trojan/worm attracting garbage?! Maybe they should try Mandrakelinux and finally see how free and powerful their computer can really be. I have used Mandrakelinux for 2 years and haven't had a single problem.
By the way, don't bother modding or scoring this comment because I could care less what anyone thinks about my comments.
The nicest thing about win XP SP2 - is not only does it run better, it blocks advertisments and cookies I don't want to see.
I've had no problems with XP SP2 for months...
We run mostly windows 2000 and windows XP machines and I can say that our failure rate is NOWHERE near these numbers.
Why you ask?
We prevent any user from installing software. We push out patches on a regular basis, and our anti-virus software is self-updating.
Simply, we keep users from doing bad things to their machines.
We also run some OS X machines - those seem to be just as stable in a controlled environment.
Our linux machines don't get touched by end users (Most of our users are scared of linux). Those machines are also reliable.
I guess the common thread in all of this is bad users are to blame - not bad operating systems.
-ted
That can't be righ*##?#.* ... carrier lost
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
I have been a windows developer almost all my life. I recently started a consulting biz and I needed a file server. The choices were
1. Buy a MS Small biz server (looks like they have a limited license program for $600, u get the commonly used servers).
2. Download and install a Linux distro with Samba as PDC and have my XP and 2K boxes talk to it. Invest some time to learn it.
I chose the second option and I have not regretted my decision.
Among the immediete thing I noticed were,
1. I notice, admire and awe the fact that the hard disk activity is 80-90% lower than what it was when the same m/c used to have 2K earlier.
2. File transfer from samba seems much faster than the fle transfer when I used to have 2K ealier on the same box. I also feel Samba is the best program ever on Linux.
3. Subversion seems to be a very good alternative to VSS and CVS, so far I have had no issues with it.
even run Halflife 2 or IE 6, 100% of the time. Meh. Loser Mac users.
I drank what? -- Socrates
"I'm not trying to bash either side, but there are very, very few cases (IMHO) where a computer needs to be up for 99 days without a reboot."
But in those "very, very few cases", the same code is being run (basicly) as on the machines that do not need that same degree of stability.
Because the code is good enough to provide that degree of stability to those who need it, those who do not need it also benefit.
By "session", I presume that it means any time you have to log out or shut down, it ends a session. What other reasons also require shutdown?
Note that I use the word "require" here. This measurement is meaningless because it doesn't analize why people shut down, just how often those shutdowns are forced by software failure.
Does it include shutdowns due to subtle malfunctions as failures? I regularly have to shut down simply because Word is misbehaving - consistently misformatting a page, for instance. Closing Word doesn't actually unload it from memory, so I have to reboot to fix that. These don't look like a crash, but they're close enough.
Heck, this week I've had to reboot my machine about a dozen times because Thunderbird stops fetching my mail when I run City of Heros. Do they include that kind of thing? Probably not.
What might actually be useful is a chart that says "if you've run Windows for X hours, you have a N% chance of Windows packing it in without notice". That, at least, would tell me when I'm pressing my luck.
No, I don't shut down at night. My experience with computers is that every time you turn one off and on, you increase your chances of hardware failure. Maintaining a steady power state increases the longevity of your parts, and I don't consider filling landfills faster to be an appropriate price to pay for using less electricity.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
I worked at a game development company for 5 years and XP was the most stable OS I had ever used in all that time. My reboot percentage on XP is far, far below 12%. I know it's anecdotal, but my experiences contradict their results.
Perhaps the userbase? Possibly.
Those crashing Windows boxes would probably crash 8% of the time if they were running Linux. All that smoke being sucked into the case, being deposited on the electronics. I am halfway serious about this. I've worked with French engineers, coworkers have spent some time visiting a partner's engineers in France. I have to wonder what a coating of ash would do to a motherboard, network card, video card, etc.
Another thing to consider is that localized versions of some software package may be less reliable than their english versions.
I realize it is politically correct and fashionable to trash MS but 4-8% is so high and so out of sync with my experience that I can't help but honestly think that there is something else going on here. I work in a 300+ corporate environment, our PCs range from Dells to whitebox clones. We do software development of 3D graphics applications. The worst I have personally experienced on an occasional basis is that my code screws up while in Direct3D and I have to log out/log in to get back to the GUI. Its not like I haven't made a similar mess under Linux. I've been using Win2K for a few years, XP for about 6 months. I think I may have seen 3 blue screens in that period. This ignores bad video drivers that are quickly reverted. With respect to the consistently flaky machines I've seen at work it has generally been bad RAM. One machine had a motherboard flake out after several months of flawless use.
Based on personal experience, that must mean that I know 8% of all Windows users! Wow!
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Rebooting Windows is seen as a normal way to fix problems because it is generally the easiest & fastest way, even though it is clearly not the best way. I suspect a lot of Windows server reboots are more the result of laziness on the part of the admin than a flawed OS. Server reboots can often be avoided by simply restarting the right process.
Some of the Linux admins I know would rather spend 5 hours tracking down the cause of a frozen process than to admit defeat and reboot the server.
If that same level of care and attention is given to a Windows box, it will also run for a long time.
TODO: come up with a clever sig
The following is a purely subjective experience, but it's a rationale for reasonable doubt of the the reported 8% figure being realistic:
the only good win system is a dead one.
Seriously, this is NOT trolling:
they all EVENTUALLY need rebooting.
What's more, USERS BELIEVE THIS, so they get in the habit of shutting down frequently (e.g., every night, or whenever "the system" seems a little punky).
If users didn't shut-down so often, they'd experience a lot more eventual problems which REQUIRED shutdown.
IOW, TFA misses all the PRE-EMPTIVE shutdown which occur.
I agree that windows crashes more than I'd like it to (never), but I hardly ever experience crashes anymore. I have a laptop only now and shut it down every night, unlike a desktop I had a couple years ago which I left on all the time. I had way more crashes (but still very few) with the desktop than I do the laptop... I say who cares? Rebooting isn't the end of the world, do it once a day and you'll be fine. (maybe?) I think windows crashes are greatly exaggerated; however annoying they may be.
I farted
I have an NT 4.0 workstation at home, P200 with 64mb of RAM, which I managed to forego rebooting for 77 days this winter until a circuit breaker popped in my apartment. I also have a primarly XP machine which I rebooted weekly and the major difference between the two was in their use; The newer machine functioned for web design, games and video editing (among other things) none of which I did with the NT 4.0 machine. I suspect the 4 times rate of reboot for XP compared to NT (and 3 times for 2k) would decrease with the same programs and computer capabilities.
In any case, Windows is incredibly poor compared to *NIX. Being 99% GUI-based does have it's drawbacks.... (But it's so pretty!)
"I've been using personal computers at home and at work since the early 1980's."
Same here. Still am. NetAdmin with about 300 users and 30 servers.
"Of all the computers I've used in that time, I shut off every one on a daily basis and have never had a failure of any kind."
Most of the workstations get rebooted each evening. It's easier that way.
Also, we lease the workstations so none of the hardware is over 3 years old. All of it Compaq and HP.
I see about 6 hard drive failures 6 power supply failures a year on deployed equipment. I also see a few DOA motherboards / hard drives / power supplies every year.
Monitors? We have about 5% failure rate at the end of 3 years with the CRT models (we're moving to the LCD ones).
"However, I've had a few servers that stay on all the time lose a hard disk after a restart due to power failures, or other infrequent power downs."
We've only recently started with the 1U models with ATA drives. So far, only 2 failures. On the SCSI models, we've had 5 failures total in the last 4 years (and 2 power supplies go bad).
My best Windows experiences have been with Windows 2000. I bought a brand new laptop that came loaded with XP. It hard crashed (i.e. rebooted itself or the screen froze) on average more than one time per day that it was used. Performance also sucked. Eventually I got fed up and "upgraded" to Windows 2000. Very few stability or performance problems after that.
The same laptop ran Mandrake and later SUSE and Gentoo without ever having any stability issue. For me, Windows 2000 was the summit of Microsoft OS and XP was a step backwords. For me, Linux has always been much better than any Windows OS in nearly every way that is important to me. Your mileage may vary, especially for people who "don't know what they're doing".
In the summer of '99 I moved to a flat in central Warsaw for about 4 months. During that time, the celeron 333 running Win NT 4 (sp4a? don't remember) went down ONCE - and that was when I turned it off to help a friend with a bios problem over the phone. I did some development and a lot of photoshop work on that box, took many a licking and never stopped ticking.
[sarcasm]
;)
Ok this study is great... and incredibly accurate too...
[/sarcasm]
These companies that were studied probably have rather large and very expensive IT departments... The people using the systems are mostly average and below computer users and use ONLY what they have been told to use by the IT department which has spend millions ensuring that their systems were running software that is stable enough for a production environment... (MS Wind + MS Office + MS Servers + MS Security + 1 or 2 specialized and highly developed apps)
My point is that for this test to me accurate run this same test on 1.5M slashdot users.... those numbers will rise dramatically... then average the two -- allow for a 3-5 point margin of error and viola! more accurate results...
On a side note I've found that Windows 98 is incredibly stable for weeks on end when run in VMWARE under LINUX
Cole
Anyone remember this site?
HGTTG: "I knew that there was something fundementally wrong with the Universe."
I've rebooted my current box once since I put in my new hard drive. That was just because I installed SP2 and new drivers.
The only time XP has blue screened on me, ever, is when my hard drive began to die.
I've never had to restart because of sluggishness.
Of course, I don't go around installing random spyware on my system, so...
Linux, on the other hand, used to require restarts when X would mess up and I couldn't even switch to a terminal login. My Linux laptop has to be restarted when I close the lid and open it back up.
That means it works 92% of that time. That sounds pretty good to me!
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
I love how Slashdot reports this. "WINDOWS FAILS 8% OF THE TIME!"
1.) These reports were gathered from companies. They weren't home users at all.
2.) No mention is made of the cause, like poorly programmed applications or drivers. No matter how much you *want* to believe Windows 2000/XP is poorly coded, it's not. I've had Slackware crash several times on me in the past few years. I don't blame Slackware for it.
This is just more Slashdot spin.
is better than zero "9"s. But that's a long way off from trusting an OS for applications where reliability is very important.
I think everyone here knows five "9"s is standard for telco.
As another poster points out, it's because Linux desktop sessions typically last so much longer than typical Windows sessions, mostly for historical and cultural reasons.
It varies across my Linux machines enormously. My laptop gets shutdown every night (Fedora Core 2). My home machine runs Mandrake Cooker and sees a bust up every 6 weeks or so when something breaks in Cooker but I expect that - that's the price for running a bleeding-edge distro and the benefits of having the latest stuff is worth the hassle as far as I'm concerned.
Now my work desktop (Mandrake Community) sees heavy duty usage both for local and remote operations. Its current uptime is 73 days, with the last reboot(s) due to a power cut(s). It runs a wide range of scripts, programs and apps, from Lotus Notes 6.51 (on WINE), Mozilla 1.7, OpenOffice.org. Just for kicks it also runs 3D screensavers (from xscreensaver) and has a "live" backdrop courtesy of xplanet.
On this machine, gdm and X has been operational without a break since 5th July and X has racked up 3 pure days of CPU time (probably mostly due to xscreensaver :-) ). System updates and vulnerabilities have been patched several times in that period.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
but the chrome makes it go faster! oh wait...
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
When the system was upgraded about a year ago, the original computers were replaced by Dell computers using Microsoft software. Baggett said the Microsoft software contained an internal clock designed to shut the system down after 49.7 days to prevent it from becoming overloaded with data. -- Human Errors Silenced Airports
That sounds like the Win32 uptime counter striking again... and not a human error at all.
[someone just commented to me: "Maybe the Human error was deploying something that needed to be
manually reset every month and a half."]
Some purely anecdotal evidence: For me the latest SP of Win2k was less stable than the last, so I'm not sure it's always monotonically increasing in stability.
Thankfully, I stopped using Win2k and switched to Debian. :-)
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
And see for me SP2 was a nice boost in stability, added features I needed. Manipulated some windows settings regarding program scheduling and memory usage (background services and system cache), and today my computer is more stable than it ever has been.
I remember a year ago I was having massive issues with spontaneous reboots while editing video. Rolled back video card drivers, sound drivers, etc. Was even ready to go back to Win2k, cuz i was going nuts. Anyway one day stumbled on something that prompted me to run Prime95 torture tests, and lo and behold I was getting errors in that, Prime95 reported memory problems (which only would manifest under heavy loads like video editing). So I jumped into my BIOS to check memory timings, and tada, I'd manually set my timings rather than using the ones from SPD. I switched to SPD and all my problems were gone, sure my memory timings weren't quite as aggressive 3-2-2 instead of 2-2-2, but the performance impact was minimal.
So my whole point is that how many of these crashes are hardware issues that require a reboot? With computers getting cheaper and cheaper all the time, and the uninformed masses not buying a Dell (okay i know they aren't the greatest either) how many are getting sub-par hardware thats causing them problems?
Does anybody have good testing of OSX 10.2, 10.3?
I am guessing that with 10.3 systems are much lower than 1%
That's because 50% of the morons are users! Or verse visa .. you know.
Bollocks. Neither my XP install nor my Linux install fail. Average session length is about 4 months for XP and 6 months for Linux. FUD or crap behind the keyboard.
Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.
... 100% of the time.
1 254230
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/16/
Yes, I have witnessed a Windows ATM reboot. That is how I came to know that it ran WINDOWS NT service pack 4, It came back after 2 minutes, I could even hear the initiation voice of the printer. Saying more on this topic might be bad for the company that provide me the service. :) Only suggestion better use something that is stable, offcourse I mean LINUX. !!!
We have a dedicated Win 3.1 box at work that's been up more than half a year. It is mostly used to keep a single DOS application up, with a modem attached. Sure, the resources drop over time (mostly from people playing games on it), but it serves its purpose (whatever that may be.) :)
There is also a firewall running on a Win 3.1 laptop that has been up for months as well. Don't underestimate the power of 3.1!
Aside from the occational windows update I have never had to reboot my XP machine and I can count on one hand the number of times I have had to reboot my 2k machine. I suspect this statistic is because 8% of windows users are so technologically inept that no OS could withstand thier abuse.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
I may be repeating Microsoft marketing, but you are repeating tired old fanboy crap.
Computers AREN'T cars, and NONE of them behave like it. Linux is still a nightmare for the average user, BSD is pretty much unsuable as a desktop system, Zeta/BeOS/SkyOS/Syllable/Menuet/PegasOS and all other hobby OSes are not ready for primetime. Macs have their share of problems too. ALL OSes suck.
You can bitch and moan about XP all you like, but as the admin of literally hundreds of computers, I can tell you - as a fact - for me, XP has been much more stable and is much more useable. Not to mention my own experience - at my house, my XP box runs far longer than my 2000 box.
But it's cool, dude. I know it's fashionable to pretend Win2k, which was never a really great desktop system, was a better OS. With an HCL about half as long as XP, you go ahead and ignore drivers as a problem.
Twitter, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Linux Torvaldyos! Quit taking DP from ESR and RMS's feculent cocks and why don't you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how Microsoft is stalking you. Wasn't it you who said that Microsoft believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.
Because a full 50% of my 'sessions' with linux require a reboot. 1) When I do an installation for the first time I typically have to reboot to load the new kernel from it's newly installed location 2) The next boot stays up for a long, long time. 8% is WAY less than 50%! Clearly windows is better.
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
I thought the "testing" phase was when the bugs were worked out...oh, well.
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
Twitter, you're a petulant cock-gobbling sycophant to Linux Torvaldyos! Quit taking DP from ESR's and RMS's feculent cocks and why don't you try to stop sucking quite so much? Get out of your parents' basement and see the real world - maybe then you'll see how pathetic you sound, with your neverending stream of bullshit about how Microsoft is stalking you. Wasn't it you who said that Microsoft believes your insane ranting is actually a threat to them, so they PAY PEOPLE to reply to you on Slashdot? No sir, I don't get any money. I do it for the love. Someone has to go up against your paranoid whining. So get back in your cage and shut the fuck up already.
What a load of crap
hmm, I wonder what atms you were working on, here in minneapolis the diebolds, and NCR atms ususally take about 5-10 minutes to reboot, running the same OS.
The people who save time by pressing the power button instead of going Start>Shut Down?
And someone or something required it.. Same with Linux, VMS, RT-11. Same with PalmOS, eventually your PP will run out of power and need restarting. Watch my karma go down to -2!!!!
And people ask me why I still use win2k!
I knew there was something to mu hunch, I wonder if XP will be as stable when it reaches SP4?
On another note, its obvous that if you fill a windowz box with crap its more likly to crap out than if you did a pure MS install with only basics, its not rocket science people!
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
Story at 11.
Here at work, we have two Applied Art & Design labs of 20+ eMacs running OS X 10.3.5. Here are some interesting statistics for you:
They are heavily used by classes over a 16-hour period in a variety of applications: Dreamweaver '04, Flash '04, MS Office, Painter 8, Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS, ImageReady, Final Cut Express, Maya Complete, Carrara 3D, Quark Express 6.0, iMovie, iDVD, and a variety of other resource intensive apps. They are never shutdown, until the end of the semester when the new images are loaded.
Out of both labs during the course of a semester, we reboot maybe 1 or 2 in each lab of 24 eMacs. 9 times out of 10 in this case, it's because someone yanked their USB thumbdrive out while it was still mounted and being accessed, rather than ejecting properly.
Win ME had to be the most crash prone OS of the bunch! I find XP to be slighty more stable then win98/2000. Of course alot this depends on what someone is running and how often they reinstall windows. I had pretty good luck with win98 if I reinstalled the OS every month or so... thank God that is not necessary with XP. kevin
Run Windows in a virtual machine where it can cause minimal harm.
This reminds me of when I ran a large MP3 search engine (back in the .com days.. it was called Acidsearch, if anyone remembers). Anyways, the site started out as my first project in PERL, and by the time the 'mp3 revolution' hit, my site was already up and running.. more importantly, the name started with an A, so several major search engines gave it in the top 5 results for "mp3 search".
Traffic went from 1-2k/day to about 40-50k/day within the span of a few months.
The server was a P2-400 with 256mb of RAM, and the load hit 120+ (I didn't realize this was possible up until then.. ps reported several hundred zombie perl processes). It took over 3 minutes to even execute the uptime command, and about 15 minutes to login over ssh.. but the box stayed up and operational, just very, very, VERY slow. This was either a 2.0 or a 2.2 kernel, I believe it was running Redhat 5 (not my #1 choice at the time, but the colocation host didn't offer support for any other flavor of Linux).
I ended up rewriting the site into modules (parser remained in PERL as all my attempts to port it to PHP3 failed miserably, but the front-end was all re-done in PHP) and using MySQL to cache results.. server load never went above 2 again.
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
I support an office which is running W2K on the servers (about 40 of them) and about 300 XP Pro workstations. Since switching from NT to XP, I would have to say that the failure/crash/reboot ratio has dropped considerably. Before the switch it was almost daily that I would have to tell someone to reboot their computer. With XP, I have never told someone to reboot their computer. In fact, my workstation (which gets abused alot more than users workstations) has been up for 4 months now without any issues. I think it all comes down to proper education for the users and IT personel; and proper administration of the computers.
Of course, XP auto reboots instead of BSODing. So your users might be rebooting without calling you for help.
Have you looked at how often this happens?
Its a moot point for the average desktop user - a reboot isn't the end of the world (especially with word doing autorecovery of a document).
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
I manage and use Linux on several desktops. Most of these are businesses doing basic desktop tasks, internet browsing, word processing, etc. I'm including updates in all these estimates, and logging off every day isn't really enforced so users can keep sessions and apps running for weeks at a time.
A distro like Debian Stable will literally stay up and work fine for months at a time. In fact I can't say I've ever seen either a crash or slowdown. Using Debian Stable means you're using a 3 year old desktop, though, which, in OSS, is *ancient*. This isn't a good choice for your new Dell P4. Hardware support aside, though, even Woody with KDE 2.x is comparable in desktop features to Windows 98/2000.
Fedora needs to go down for kernel updates more often, and mine have an average uptime of around two weeks. I'd like to think this is mainly due to wine running Word/Excel, but it probably leaky video drivers that are just exacerbated by wine. Fedora is the desktop of choice for me at the moment, though, because KDE 3.x has far surpassed anything available in Windows.
So uptime in Linux has as much to do with the version used as it does in Windows. Although I've never used either, I'd guess distros like RedHat Enterprise or SuSe would be a "best of both worlds" solution for recent software with all of the bugs worked out.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
If you take good care of your computer, an 8% failure rate is extremely unlikely. I have had an XP Home machine for over 2 years without ever needing to be reinstalled/formatted/system-restored/whatever-ed. Besides when my defective CPU fan stopped spinning, I've only ever had a two or three crashes severe enough to call failures. On a dosen or so occasions I have had to end and restart explorer.exe from the task manager, but usually because I screwed with something I shouldn't have. My new XP Pro laptop hasn't so much as hiccupped yet. That said, I have seen XP systems that crash 25 times ever hour... usually because of spyware :-(
I think that with the security fixes of SP2 and Longhorns move towards Unix-like limited user environments, spyware (and this high failure rate) should be almost completely dissapaited. A little basic computer education for the masses would probably help as well.
http://brandonbloom.name
Makes no sense at all. One line, and the rest is in French. Ah, the French have their own way of seeing things. As Steve Martin observed "The French have a different [from English] word for EVERYTHING!"
Our 6,000+ users are still mostly on Win NT, with an IE build that *did not* implement the "web desktop" that became the default for Win 2K and Win XP. Even Microsoft knows the browser is their Achilles heel, that's why web browsing is disabled by default in Windows 2003 Server. Even if you switch to Mozilla or another browser, you're still dependant on the IE codebase for file browsing, which I blame for most of the worst lockups and core dumps in XP. Making the browser part of the O/S was the single worst design decision MS made. Ironically it was not done for engineering, but legal, reasons. While Netscape may have first proposed that "The Browser is the Operating System", MS made it a reality in an effort to avoid the court-ordered removal of its own browser from the base O/S. It's not just IE that's a problem. All browsers seem to have their own threshhold beyond which instability follows. In addition to my company build XP machine, I run a R-O-C-K S-O-L-I-D FreeBSD system under my desk. That system hasn't been rebooted in months. But I do have to kill -9 Mozilla quite frequently, usually after some idiotic web content causes its process to spin out of control. Fortunately, Mozilla is not my shell or my file browser (I have xterm for that), so I can continue working even when the "page du jour" throws my browser into a tailspin.
eldapo
If you can get to a prompt (logged in as a user, not as root) the following may work:
kill -9 -1
This kills all your jobs with highest priority, and should kill X. If you kill all the jobs as root, you probably need to reboot...
To sum up, two outdated AV engines competing with each other and with the spyware that was running rampant.
as long as you dont connect it to the internet, use internet explorer, use any complex memory eating apps, never restart the machine more than twice, etc
;)
then you will achieve the 8% failure rate
While I can read french, I have a little bit of trouble confirming the story. I picked up the sentence "Ainsi, le taux de panne moyen nécessitant un redémarrage du système est mesuré autour de 8% par session." Whileit does match with the "Windows Fails 8% of the time", there is no information on why it fails, let alone any other basis of comparison. Other recent postings elaborate on this...
In any case, I haven't had any recent crashes by any opering system. The only memorable recent crashes (e.g. past 3 years or so) would have to do with faulty video drivers that do not function properly, regardless of whether it is Windows, Linux, or whatever other OS is installed.
Granted, I do know how to require Windows to reboot in order to become usable - it involves writing a Windows callback that returns incorrect values for the message WM_NCHITTEST, usually by forgetting to call the default Windows Callback. (The CTRL-ALT-DEL might be able to get pas this, but opening the task manager to kill the application won't really help. Given what accidently happened last time, I don't really want to check again.)
It's also not same type of FUD as some posters are
claiming it to be - it's more like a statement saying that the "Zero-Paper" office is still not yet ready. The only reference suggesting Open Source would be one small statement in the conclusion, and it seems to be secondary to something about... "optimizing license management and increating the time within upgrade cycle for hardware and software?"
Can't really tell to make sure. At the very least, Slashdot could provide a link to a translator to help understand. (I'm using Google to supplement my personal translation). Slashdot could do a better job to help us understand the article - but then I'd be expecting too much from the editors.
I have run Windows XP Professional on my office laptop and home desktop PC for the last year. I start each system daily and I have rarely experienced any problems that require a reboot.
If I had to reboot as often as the author states, it would be 87 reboots (365 days * 12% * 2 PCs) due to problems over the course of one year. This is definetly not what I have observed on my workstations, or workstations of my co-workers.
Every 8 out of 100 seconds, Windows fails. Ok, that sounds about right.
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Okay, I'm writing this reply on my Mac, but my windows xp computer is right behind me. The thing is that Windows XP machines do have a nasty way of getting unstable when programming distributed programs w/ SQL Server/Visual Studio/Javascript/Debuggers and such running all the time. Then throw a couple custom vb dlls into the mix, and yes, that's when windows sucks. I, just now, was writing my reasons for still having a computer that runs Windows XP, and CRAP, every reason I have is useless. I litterally stumped myself. I guess the point I'm trying to make about is about failures anyway. Okay, I'm an expert, so that makes my data a little useless. But... My XP machine gives me errors and warnings so few times that I really believe that there are more USER errors in windows because there are probably a higher percentage of uninformed users running windows than any other OS. Common User Errors 1. Installing reputationless or shotty shareware ... big no no ... that KaZaa program is probably a big source of errors and virii
2. Not installing updates ... those windows updates keep me humming along nicely
3. Poor file management
4. Lack of Anti-Virus protection... most machines come with anti-virus, most users don't update it. Automatic updates help, but alot of users don't update the subscriptions to updates
5. Not updating hardware drivers ... although system and component manufacturers regularly provide driver updates, most users don't look for them or update them.
My point is that I don't know of any reason that a windows machine can't be stable. The one sitting behind me has only been shut down for hardware upgrades in the last two months, and hasn't crashed at all.
OTOH ... My Mac crashed 3 times when I hit the F button by accident while playing Capture the Flag in Unreal Tournament 2004 (which, btw, is SOOO much better than Doom 3 multiplayer, but that's another story)
as long as it's not "my Rusty is french". Oh, come on, it's only humor.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Linux 2.6.7-1.494.2.2smp #1 SMP Tue Aug 3 09:59:49 EDT 2004
uptime
00:30:15 up 44 days, 8:53, 6 users, load average: 0.11, 0.14, 0.15
First of all, my win2k machine at work gets rebooted every day, since I have to shut it down at night... and it hardly ever fails unless I end up coding something before the first cup of coffee, but in that case, I could probably bring down a linux box just as easily... My home machines run win2k and go 24/7 my newest ones can easily go a month before rebooting, and even the oldest one tends to survive for about a month. When it comes to servers, my linux box has been running for 167 days now, and before that it had done about 150. The only reason for the reboot was a technician in the datacenter unplugged the wrong machine... My windows servers that get 2x the attention hardly ever survive for more than 45 days.
XP only auto reboots if the option is selected. System Properties --> Advanced --> Startup and Recovery. When we build up our computers, we disable this option as we want to see any error messages as they happen.
...and when is Bill Gates sending you your commission check! (does anyone actually ever read these articles before they submit comments or maybe this is really the /.yahoo board)
First, the article is talking about the corporate environment only. Second they are talking about workstations not servers. The article is about people running standard business apps, not gameing. Third it is a statistically significant sample size and represents the "average" workstion and level of support you would see in most professional environments (ie not home use).
That said; blaiming the end users is bullshit. If you bought a car that needed to be serviced twice every day would you accept the auto makers excuse that since you are not a professional racing crew you do not know what you are doing? Come on people ~ windows is intended for use by these people - the end users of corporate IT systems are not the IT department.
In my personal experience, all the service patches are up to date on my machine, I check for updates daily, have no spyware or viruses, and am only running business software on my workstation(office, a web based crm, adobe, and some web browsing plus misc. overhead like virus scanners). Still it is an unusual day if I do not have to reboot the machine at least once. Frozen sessions are a common occurance on all Windows platforms. XP is one of the most half baked OS I have seen from microsoft. So bad that I have rolled back my machines from it.
We're running Debian, with most of the computers (newer ones) with nVidia cards, and we're having no problems with X.
There's an occasional problem with Konqueror crashing, but we've learned how to avoid it (hitting "preview" or "post", then remembering to copy the text inside a comment box prior to the page changing is enough to do it for me on one desktop). Konqueror (used for file browsing) also had a problem with directories containing more than 10,000 files, crashing on opening of the directory, but I believe that bug has been fixed, and I haven't run into the problem anymore.
Other problems with X? Can't recall any in the last 12+ months. Uptimes (including X) are measured in months, and the count normally stops for a hardware change or a power problem. This is both on cheap pre-built Microtels, Wintergreens (TigerDirect version of Microtels), and on in-house built desktops. Since its cheaper to buy a pre-built Microtel or Wintergreen, in-house built computers are less and less likely now. Something built in-house is now something like a raid-server, and I suspect even those will be purchased from local vendors soon, though the customization possible in a computer built in-house sometimes outweighs the "not my fault" cover sometimes sought by individuals who have other things on their minds.
Savings on licensing costs bring a big smile to everyone, and the "set it and forget it" of Linux brings a bigger smile to everyone. We have Pentium first generation computers running X without problems, and when things are slow, the next project is going to be getting some 486s to run X. No hardware is going to be needed, as the 10 mbit network cards were purchased for a $1 each a few years ago, and the Pentium first generation computers are running X fine with 10 mbit cards on some of them. And they are actually faster than the old windows 3.1 and 95 applications and OS that was on some of them.
Sorry I missed your joke :) But I must agree with your statement about immediately noticing that Apple laptops are a different breed altogether than IBM-clones. Everything seems to be in it's proper place, well organized, sturdy construction, etc. Oh and what is with the idea that 4pin firewire is useful on a laptop/workstation?
And Here I was, about to brag bthat my WinXP Pro box had been up for 8½ days (since I upgraded video card) when the NIC sh*t itself, requiring a reboot.
My Win2k Adv Server has been up for about 28 days (since we moved house) and my Fedora, Gentoo, Solaris and OpenBSD boxes the same.
I am not currently aware of the uptime of my laptop (Suse 9.1).
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