Some numbers from Vista’s crash reporting

25 Jan 2008

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.

Microsoft Internet Explorer	92
Windows Problem Reporting	52
Application Launcher	17
Windows Explorer	12
Adobe Photoshop CS3	8
Microsoft Outlook	6
Microsoft Zune	4
Mobile Networking Wizard	4
Skype	4
Windows Media Player	4
Adobe Bridge CS3	3
Adobe Illustrator CS3	3
Adobe Dreamweaver 8	3
Firefox	3
Sync manager	3
Windows Task Manager	3
Adobe Premiere Pro CS3	2
Eclipse	2
Gephex	2
Windows Live Messenger	2
Adobe OnLocation CS3	1
Adobe Photoshop CS2	1
Driver software installation	1
Filezilla client	1
Microsoft Powerpoint	1
VLC	1

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.