Win­dows Vista ships with a delight­ful tool by the aid of which it reg­u­larly digs itself a grave. Here are some find­ings after three months of use, sorted by num­ber of crashes.

By ven­dor, that con­sti­tutes 176 crashes/hangs/‘not-respondings’ of Microsoft soft­ware to 21 of Adobe soft­ware over the same period. Now, it feels like I’m cheat­ing the num­bers here by report­ing Win­dows Prob­lem Report­ing itself, because prob­a­bly 90% of its crashes occur when report­ing on Inter­net Explorer, but hey — these are the num­bers Microsoft’s soft­ware itself gave me, so who’s complaining?

In case you think this isn’t a fair com­par­i­son for rea­sons of time spent using var­i­ous pro­grammes, exclude Prob­lem Report­ing crashes (though you shouldn’t) and the Microsoft stat comes down to 124. That is, lots.

I can’t think of a day since own­ing this com­puter I wouldn’t have used at least one piece of Adobe soft­ware, most com­monly more. To be fair, Adobe soft­ware is more likely to do weird things (like, ya know, refus­ing to save) caus­ing me to restart the appli­ca­tion rather than let­ting it ‘crash’ per se… but Microsoft’s junk is vastly less likely to give me any sort of warn­ing before flak­ing out.

These crashes are reported over a three-month period span­ning Novem­ber 26 until Jan­u­ary 25.

Vista SP1 con­tin­ues to be eagerly awaited.