ITunes 8 a Real Killer App; Taking Down Vista

CWmike writes "Apple 's latest version of iTunes crashes Windows Vista when an iPod or iPhone is connected to the PC, scores of users have reported on Apple's support forum. Plug in and Vista crashes and shows the 'blue screen of death.' The errors began showing up immediately after updating iTunes to Version 8.0, which Apple released Tuesday as part of its iPod refresh. 'I just installed iTunes 8 over my iTunes 7 on Vista [and] now whenever I plug in my iPod, I get a blue screen death. Three times so far. Even if it is plugged in on boot, I get a blue screen," said a user identified as 'sambeckett' on the support forum about 90 minutes after Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrapped up the iPod launch."

Comments

Good Marketing

[TheSpoom]

Expect Apple to blame Vista.

Re:Good Marketing

[Hyppy]

The special drivers are still signed by Microsoft. If they weren't it would be quite obvious due to the many "Arte you SURE?" messages.

Re:Good Marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's not. If you are going to deploy an application and you are a well funded commercial entity it is your burden to test it on whatever platform you plan on supporting. While I am not letting Vista off the hook for this flaw you cannot say Apple is 100% in the clear here. Either they didn't test it, which is incompetence, or they didn't care.

But I am sure if the next version of Microsoft Office somehow crashed OSX, the conspiracy nuts would be in here complaining about how Microsoft is trying to tarnish Apple's good name.

Re:Good Marketing

[Sandbags]

Hey bud, I'm a software tester for a disaster recovery company. Let me put this past you:

- 4 identical hardware machines
- 4 exact copies of an ISO of Vista EE
- all 4 machines side by side, I make the same click on the same screen on each one.

After installation is completed with exactly the same settings on all 4 machines, we install our corporate AV program, then allow the machines to download and install updates. Each of the 4 machines has exactly the same list of updates added in the same order.

All 4 machines are benchmarked prior to and after installation, using 2 different tools from boot CDs. All 4 machines benchmark the same (within less than a second on a multi-million CPU cycle run, and withing 5 seconds on an multi-hour RAM test. No machines exhibit RAM, disk, or CPU issues and are regularly burned in and tested both before and after installations.

of the 4 machines, 1 has a C: with 3.9GB used space. 1 has 4.7GB used, 1 has 5.2 GB used, and 1 has 8.2!

One machine boots Vista in less than 22 seconds, one takes longer than 2 minutes. others are inbetween. Hard drive I/O pattern tests are run and all 4 drives exhibit nearly identical characteristics and I/O patterns for randomized I/O read/write testing.

One machine has 860MB or RAM free out of 2GB, one has less thqan 200MB free out of 2GB. Others fall between.

When we blank the drives and repeat the tests, machines exhibit completely different results. Sometimes the slowest one to boot in one test wiull be the fastest one to boot in another. Swapping components from system to system was no impact on the performance of a machine.

We started doing this test a few years ago when I was setting up several exchange 2003 servers to be used in a classroom and noticed simalar wild divergence between system performance, install size, and more, even before service packs or patches were added. We have repeasted this test with every version of 2000, XP, Vista, 2003 servre, 2008 server, as well as older OS. Anything NT or previous, and installer seems to be very consistent. Anything 2000 or later, very inconsistent. The newer it is, the worse the installer inconsistancies.

We have also done this test by repeating installations on the same single machine over and over, and the installation size on that machine is just as inconsistent.

So, what's the deal? Why does the same installer batch file, which is basically a top down program that collects data based on pre-defined rules, and processes installation order based on documented, databased information, produce such inconsistancy?

As a result, we no longer test product on a single machine, but we bought 4 each of 5 different machines, and installed the OS seperately on each one, then burned images of it. We test each application agains all 20 OS images with the same OS on each one, then swap images for each OS service pack and each OS supported. This can mean teasting a single application against over 70 Windows versions, each on 20 machines. This is a test base run of 1400 installs. After this, we release internally, and install to roughly 100 machines. We purposely buy only 2 or 3 of each model from a manufacturer to deploy in the company, so we have dozens of different machines, and allow each user to basically maintain their own box the way they like, creating what in other companies would be an IT nightmare, but in this case it;s a benefit (and each user is an admin on some level, and completely capable of maintaining their own machine). We'll find a dozen bugs we didn't find running through the 1400 image test run. After release to the field, when roughly a thousand customers get a hold of it, we'll find more bugs...

You CAN NOT test for every hardware reviosion on every machine made, and every OS that could be on it. If you're asking Apple to do that,. you're expecting them to have access to over 10 million differing system images to test on. This is IMPOSSIBLE.

The fault is ENTIRELY microsofts. If the soft

Surprising

[ohxten]

That this wasn't caught in the testing stages?

Re:But still...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe for userland drivers like printers under Vista using the latest driver model, okay, but if you mean that no driver should ever be able to crash the OS, you clearly don't understand how drivers work.

Re:But still...

[cbreaker]

But, Apple does install drivers, and those drivers CAN crash the operating system.

It's no different from any other popular operating system. If you have a bad OSX driver - boom. Grey box. If you have a bad Linux driver - boom. Kernel panic.

The only utter nonsense is that Apple can't write a driver that doesn't crash the operating system. There's tens of thousands of drivers out there, and most of them run great. Apple is big enough to do proper testing. They didn't QA properly, obviously.