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 The study was originally made by Acadys and Microcost and gathered data from 1.2M machines belonging to about one thousand companies over a period of one month in seven different countries."

Comments

Re:Perhaps is the user base of those versions?

[Tenareth]

Our entire user base (Over 1000 machines) has been moved from WindowsNT Workstation and Win2k workstation to Windows XP as a global rollout for our company (40,000+ machines). Given the same userbase, and same admins building the machines we have seen XP behave much worse than NT or 2000 ever did.

This is in a completely controlled environment, where we can use GPO to insure extra software is not installed on the machines, etc... unlike the older installed base.

Re:Perhaps is the user base of those versions?

[mrchaotica]

Fine, don't RTFA, but could you consider reading the summary, maybe?

gathered data from 1.2M machines belonging to about one thousand companies

These weren't home users!

Re:Perhaps is the user base of those versions?

[Coryoth]

came here to say exactly what you said. The amount of clueless people downloading spyware, viruses, and just general crap onto thier computers is ridiculous, and I'm suprised that the failure rate isn't higher. However, if we were to take a look at the professional usage only, where there are IT depts and such supposedly taking care of the machines, I think that the numbers would be drastically reversed.

According to the article there were no home users involved in this. It was all company workstations from about 1000 European companies. That means it pretty much is all in managed environments with an IT dept looking after it.

The best I can find is this (excuse my babelfish translation) from TFA:

"To also note, without surprise, that 95% of the stations customers are equipped with a 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 but 16%. As for Windows XP, it pains to find its public, in particular at the industrialists who choose to 83% for Windows 2000. Only the service companies have 5% of their data-processing park under Windows XP while the general average is around the 2%."

Which is about the best I can find for figures breaking down how the different versions were distributed. It seems like XP was largely uncommon except at service companies (and was then still uncommon), so maybe you could claim low sample size - but there were 1.2 million workstations in the total sample, so I don't think that'll wash either.

If someone with far better French than me could provide a proper translation of the relevant paragraph I would be grateful.

Thanks.

Jedidiah

Re:Perhaps is the user base of those versions?

[grub]

It was at least 3 years and at the University of North Carolina according to this page. Search that page for "Server Missing No More".

Unless, of course, there was more than one Novell server walled in at a university for several years... :)

Prime example of why the STORYIES need modding.

[nlinecomputers]

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.