“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 The study was originally made by Acadys and Microcost and gathered data from 1.2M machines belonging to about one thousand companies over a period of one month in seven different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,” Slashdot reports.
Link to full article here.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to reboot my XP box and I’ve had it for about 5 or 6 years now.
My usage isn’t exactly lightweight either – games, video editing, photo editing, and such.
Firewall + Virus Protection + alternate browser + a little extra care with attachments = very stable XP
12%? My experience is closer to a fraction of 1%.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to reboot my XP box and I’ve had it for about 5 or 6 years now.
My usage isn’t exactly lightweight either – games, video editing, photo editing, and such.
Firewall + Virus Protection + alternate browser + a little extra care with attachments = very stable XP
12%? My experience is closer to a fraction of 1%.
>mac dood wrote: and erk…. MDN isnt
>preaching here…theyre just reporting…
MDN does nothing of the sort. It is a news linking website. They comment on someone else’s comments.
It’s more in line with a person reading the daily news and talking about it at the office water cooler.
MDN is newslink/editorial website.
>mac dood wrote: and erk…. MDN isnt
>preaching here…theyre just reporting…
MDN does nothing of the sort. It is a news linking website. They comment on someone else’s comments.
It’s more in line with a person reading the daily news and talking about it at the office water cooler.
MDN is newslink/editorial website.
We have two labs of PCs and two of Macs. The 2 PCs have been nothing but problems since they were “upgraded” to XP. The Macs are very stable. In 4 weeks one class that uses the PCs hasn’t made it through a complete hour yet. The PCs are locked down tight (DeepFreeze, etc.) to prevent students from changing anything. It doesn’t matter — they are way too fragile. The OS X lab jsut works. ven the OS 9 lab with the older than all the PCs iMacs works fine.
Reboot? What is that?
Since I got my PB a year ago I never reboot – maybe once a month just for convenience. It’s just amazing the difference between the two OS’s.
Once you go Mac, you’ll never go back.
Try running Adobe Photoshop CS, Dreamweaver MX 2004, Fireworks MX 2004, AIM, Firefox, iTunes, and Outlook all at once on a PeeCee and see how long it lasts before either one program crashes or XP itself gives you the ‘Blue Screen of Death’
Trust me, it doesn’t take long to crash XP when you’re pushing it that hard. Now try that on a Mac like my TiPowerBook. It’s really nice being able to multitask like that and not have to worry about stability problems.
Our Win2000 boxes at work never crash, but everyone logs out at the end of each day, and only run the same three or four programs.
Mac & PC Guy, the operative word here is “here”. There weren’t any comments in this case, just a reproduction of part of the Slashdot piece.
But I actually found it odd – and disappointing – that MDN resisted the urge to preach. I guess the statistics spoke for themselves.
Mac & PC guy, get your timeline straight. Windows XP is not 5-6 years old. You were running Windows 98 or 95 back then. Microsoft’s own website dates XP to 2001.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/WinHistoryProGraphic.mspx
“…..MDN does nothing of the sort. It is a news linking website. They comment on someone else’s comments.
It’s more in line with a person reading the daily news and talking about it at the office water cooler…”
Yeah, thats one way to look at it….. but without the editorializing they do on some articles…. we wouldnt have the great discussions … here … at the MDN “Water Cooler” ….. right ?
My XP uptime is over 382 days and my idle process is mostly at 99%.
I have an util called uptime in osx terminal, but it doesn’t mention apple at all, only BSD.
Apple vs MS? Goddamn they both annoy me in different ways. Both as bad as each other.
Face it IT professionals want easy to use GUI enabled user friendly OS’s only for the fact that they are short on IT skills and ignorant towards expanding knowledge. Pure Sheep.
BAAAAAHH BAAAAAHHHHH BAAAHHHHHH
Technology is definatly for the young. These big time corporations are getting too old and rusty.
Go GOOGLE GO!
Used by millions daily, platform independant, and free to use service without advert bloats. Sort of stuff I would rather support. Young Fresh innovations.
The time is now to dump all these old wrinkled bold headed grey haired everyday sunday drivers.
xp is the best – you guys suck
hey zeddy
you don’t know shit. you’re gay like that!
We all may be speaking apples and oranges here. People have brought up the point about “What is a session?” Based on my PC-usin’ friends, they typically completely power down their computer every time they are done using it for awhile. They may keep it on during lunch, buy at the days end, it is completely shut down. Experienced Mac users typically just put their to sleep, and will only reboot for updates and of course power outages. The lesser experienced Mac users still maintain the ol’ PC habit of shutting it off every night.
If the term “reboots per session” means being forced to reboot the machine while actively using it, then this could still be a bit misleading being that Macs are often left on and don’t have the opportunity to start from scratch in the morning.
I’d like to see these “stats” broken down and categorized between computers that are started afresh in the morning, those that were on all night but put to sleep, and those that were left fully on 24/7.
For me, Panther is extremely stable. I have seen some aps like Safari freeze up for a few seconds and then suddenly stop with a request to send a bug report. But, I can’t imagine what sort catastrophic event would have to take place for Panther to suddenly freeze and need rebooting.
Get it right, BSD makes panther stable
>MacSmiley wrote: get your timeline straight. Windows XP is not 5-6 years old. You were running Windows 98 or 95 back then. Microsoft’s own website dates XP to 2001.
Ummmm… I’ve had the PC for 5-6 years, ran Win98 then Win2000 then upgraded to XP. The article mentions other versions of Windows besides XP. Try not to lash out before reading things. Thanks.
Mac & Pc Guy Smiley
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>Malice wrote: Try running Adobe Photoshop CS, Dreamweaver MX 2004, Fireworks MX 2004, AIM, Firefox, iTunes, and Outlook all at once on a PeeCee and see how long it lasts before either one program crashes or XP itself gives you the ‘Blue Screen of Death’
Can’t say I’ve tried that particular combo, but I’ve run many apps at once and although the system does slow down, it remains stable. Of course I get the occasional program crash, but the OS itself remains running.
On the Mac side, I’ve actually crashed OSX a couple of times. Program crashes are far more common compared to that though – especially video apps like FCP and Avid. OS9 crashes quite often though – in fairness so does Win9x.
I’d say OSX is still much prettier and has some key ease-of-use advantages over XP.
>MacSmiley wrote: get your timeline straight. Windows XP is not 5-6 years old. You were running Windows 98 or 95 back then. Microsoft’s own website dates XP to 2001.
Ummmm… I’ve had the PC for 5-6 years, ran Win98 then Win2000 then upgraded to XP. The article mentions other versions of Windows besides XP. Try not to lash out before reading things. Thanks.
Mac & Pc Guy Smiley
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>Malice wrote: Try running Adobe Photoshop CS, Dreamweaver MX 2004, Fireworks MX 2004, AIM, Firefox, iTunes, and Outlook all at once on a PeeCee and see how long it lasts before either one program crashes or XP itself gives you the ‘Blue Screen of Death’
Can’t say I’ve tried that particular combo, but I’ve run many apps at once and although the system does slow down, it remains stable. Of course I get the occasional program crash, but the OS itself remains running.
On the Mac side, I’ve actually crashed OSX a couple of times. Program crashes are far more common compared to that though – especially video apps like FCP and Avid. OS9 crashes quite often though – in fairness so does Win9x.
I’d say OSX is still much prettier and has some key ease-of-use advantages over XP.
Anyone surprised the number is that low? – zero cool
Not really. The data was obtained from companies and most of them have professional IT support. What is surprising is after all that, they still crash a lot.
I also had a colleague telling me he rarely had to reboot his XP.
Turned out he did it twice a day *otherwise it freezes” but was not counting those as *reboots*.
Also, he could not leave it in hybernation for long so each time he knew more than a couple hrs would have elapsed he shut down the PC.
his longest uptime was around 8 hrs, still he believed in the “I rarely have no reboot my PC”.
I found after this revealing experience that it is common habit among PC users: they perform preventive reboots. One common case seems to be when changing network configurations. It is matter of setting new IP (or switching to DHCP), change DNS server and subnet mask and REBOOT. LOL, and they are still saying “Oh, it is very stable, I practically never reboot”.
It is like when living near airports: after a while you do not notice anymore the noise “Oh, it is not that bad, we only are aware of the big transporter of 18:00” while you cannot even hear what they say for all the *other* planes hovering all day long.
I’d have to question those figures on Windows XP crashing in the corporate environment. At my work we use Dull workstations with XP and I most admit that they have never crashed in my use.
That being said, our IT department exhaustively tests hardware and software before it is deployed, and has the list of applications you can install so tightly restricted (basically anything Microsoft is OK, and Adobe Reader only because they have to, and some specialised applications, but that just about wraps it up) it’s MS or nothin’. This is done to ‘ensure platform stability’ according to the IT website. Some OS if you can’t run the applications you want or need.
I sent an email to the CEO making a case for evaluating and switching to OS X, and suggested they bypass the IT department due to their vested interest in maintaining Microsoft’s dominance on the Queensland Rail…
Their response? They demanded I apologise in writing for for my ‘highly offensive’ email.
Our IT Department has been perfectly trained by MS.
Deep sigh 🙁
Stuart: never touch someone’s wallet
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I have heard PCs are virus immune off the net and never crash if you never install anything but the OS and never switch them on.
>Listen, Windows-folks. We’re just trying to spread the word that you don’t HAVE to put up with viruses and blue-screens-of-death during your daily work.
I heard that Bill Gates was trying to sell Advertising space on the BSOD (blue screen of death), seeing as it pops up so often
I have to admit to not owning a mac though I do have a HP Pavilion with XP Pro Media Edition and I use it daily from aprox. 4 AM till Noonish and I normaly have several aplications running besides what HP has running in the back ground out of 512 megs of ram only 229 are usually avalible for my use and I have yet to crash it, I have had a game to stick for a second and then continue but I don’t play a lot of games, I don’t shut mine down when I’m done I run a virus scann and then it puts it’s self into standby, If I had a mac to try I might buy one but rite now I am very satisfied with this machine, now I won’t go into my previous Packard Bell with 98 in it lol.