Moop2000, I suppose that in your case the kernel mode part was affected, too. In theory, a reboot shouldn’t be necessary if only the user mode driver crashes. But well that is only theory. Who knows what it is really going on when such an integral part of the OS hangs.

Ochiru, thanks a lot for the hints. I can use that for my article in German that I am currently preparing. What do you mean by driver signing? You mean the required driver signing for Vista x64?

It is not free and the cost of a Vista Ultimate is orders of magnitude higher than a copy of XP.

I mentioned dualcore support as with XP I personally had reliability/performance problems with my Athlon 64 X2. Same hardware with Vista installed have had no similar problems.

-Driver signing and user mode GPU driver

With XP there were and still are a lot of unstable or plain broken GPU drivers – especially nVidia had those frequently. With Vista I have had yet to encounter such problems with nVidia or ATI drivers. But I’ve updated a few Intel GPU drivers in Lenovo T61 laptops because those were causing crashes.

-System Restore

With XP this never really worked. It works in Vista fixing an unbootable installation after a PSU failure and crash. Because even the most reliable system can still have hardware failures.

-SP1

Fixed those annoying sleep mode and file transfer problems I had with my T60 and has improved reliability index in those systems I’ve installed it already. I haven’t installed it to x64 any Vistas yet so I don’t know if it has similar results. XP SP3 in comparision doesn’t seem to be even an essential update, not until you’ve W2008 Servers.

-Windows Update installarions

Some laptops users have a peculiar habit of shutting down systems before installations are complete. Seems so far that Vista can manage this better than XP SP2.

-Offline files
There haven’t been any problems with these in Vista laptops. Missing offline files have been one of the more common problems with XP SP2.

-Copy protections and malware

Neither Vista x86 or x64 have yet suffered problems with these. There’s still zero virus infection on Vista machines I manage.
In comparison, I recently spend full 9 hours of my saturday cleaning up clients XP SP2 laptop – from about 1800 infected files

Copy protection I’ve mentioned because those act like viruses and cause all kinds of reliability issues.

Well, there’s a few already.

-Memory management and dualcore support

That being said, I still prefer XP in terms of speed over Vista any day. It should not take as long as it does to move/copy files on a modern computer!

The current problem with Vista’s stability however is that the applications that I must run today have often not yet released a version that is Vista compatible, or I can’t afford to upgrade to the version that is. For example, my CRM, which is already 2 versions older than their latest: It’s going to cost me about 10grand in actual software costs to upgrade, 3 man months in time/payroll, and then the costs associated with the actual rollout, that being, user training and reduced productivity while the users regain familiarity. Were I to upgrade to Vista, that simple platform upgrade would require me to undertake some fairly significant projects in order to bring all of the applications up to version that supports Vista. The current version of my CRM crashes all over the place if I try to run it on Vista, even in compatibility mode.

So in the case of my CRM, Vista is highly unstable with my current version, but I imagine would be rock solid with the latest released version.

I suppose I’m also saying that the perceived stability of Vista relies heavily on the stability of the applications that run on it. Perhaps XP is “stable” today simply because the applications/drivers have matured enough to leave XP alone.

As Microsoft moves towards running more in the user space and isolating the OS, I believe the stability of XP will be shambles in comparison. Vista is headed in the right direction. In addition, I imagine the perception of my end-users may change as they see applications crashing individually instead of taking down the entire platform.

I’d really like to see Windows 7 become the very last full platform upgrade. I’d like to see a modular architecture that can be upgraded and downgraded similar to the linux kernel and the way you can load different kernels and modules through Grub. Were Microsoft to take this modular approach to their OS, my ability to roll out new modules/kernels to my user base, as well as my comfort level with rolling new things out faster (because I could back them out with a simple boot.ini edit ala GRUB), well it would just be much easier and more economic for me to feed Microsoft and keep up with their platform.

Thanks for the post Michael; good topic.