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Big Challenges for Vista Bug Hunters

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the game-over-man-game-over dept.

The New York Times is reporting on the final rush to bug fix Windows Vista. Even with massive numbers of testers and five years of work behind them, the folks in Redmond are pushing it to the wire in order to make sure it releases soon. From the article: "Vista has also been tested extensively. More than half a million computer users have installed Vista test software, and 450,000 of the systems have sent crash data back to Microsoft. Such data supplements the company's own testing in a center for Office referred to as the Big Button Room, for the array of switches, lights and other apparatus that fill the space. (A similar Vista room has a less interesting name -- Windows Test Technologies.) This is where special software automatically exercises programs rapidly while looking for errors."

2 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I wouldn't want to be the guy by jonnyj · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The real world is probably worse than the statistics suggest.

    I tried to install Vista on three PCs, all of which passed Microsoft's Ready for Vista testing tool, but all three failed before they were able to sent any crash data back to Microsoft. Two installs hung due because Vista didn't like my SATA / motherboard combination. The other got its knickers twisted over my partitioning scheme. And that was before I got a chance to find out if any of my other hardware (printer, scanner, TV card, firewire, network, graphics, CD/DVD, monitor, soundcard, suspend/resume, camera, etc) had any kind of working support.

    Recent Linux kernels work perfectly with all this hardware. Could Vista be the first Microsoft OS that lags behind Linux for hardware support?

  2. Yes, you can use hardware to track down bugs... by klubar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hardware is almost required to debug some low-level system code. Real-time stuff, like device drivers and scheduler really requires hardware tracer to determine what happened and when.

    With XP, almost all of the crashes are due to bad (usually non-MS) device drivers. If you run a system with pure MS drivers and quality hardware you'll never see a BSOD. If you run the usual business suite of software (Office, Outlook, IE) you probably never see an application crash.

    It's the crappy hardware and badly written drivers that cause the crashes. That's the difference with Apple.... since they control the hardware there's less crashes due to bad hardware and there are fewer third-party drivers for Mac hardware. The software is probably the same quality.