The State of Windows 8 | Hacker News Reader

The State of Windows 8

soluto.com

I am not sure how good this data might be, being that it originates from software that might not be widely deployed. That said, it is always prudent to look for other sources and compare:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...

http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share....

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

The most surprising bit of information for me has to do with Vista. I didn't realize that it lost out so much ground to W7. We are still running Vista 64 bit on a number of machines because upgrading to W7 would also require upgrading a number of engineering packages that don't play well with W7 unless upgraded. That would cost tens of thousands of dollars and it simply isn't necessary. Aside from a few "features" Vista 64 has been rock-solid as a platform. Some of these workstations see heavy FEA work 18 hours a day, 5 to 7 days a week.

Vista got better right around the time W7 was released anyway, right? Both in terms of the OS itself as well as better support from third parties. I've always thought that W7, while a great operating system in its own right, also benefited from Vista acting as a sort of beta test for all the new shit they added like UAC and better separation of concerns. FWIW I had a Vista machine from a few months after release until W7 came out and I liked it well enough to consider it at least an improvement on XP.

XP got good with SP2. W7 ist SP2 of Vista ;)

What are those packages that will cost a lot to move to Windows 7? I am curious because I work on legacy application integration.

I'd have to go back a couple of years and review which ones have upgrade issues. I remember that Solidworks is one of them. We are under maintenance contract on SW itself (~$1,500 year per seat), so that's not a problem. The FEA tool, which cost ~$12K as well as our integrated CAM sofware (I think it was around ~$8K) I believe are the issues. Since the incremental improvement wouldn't really buy us much of anything measurable it makes no sense to spend thousands per workstation just because you upgraded the OS.

>Some of these workstations see heavy FEA work 18 hours a day, 5 to 7 days a week.

I don't really see how constant high CPU usage is a good measure of the stability of an operating system.

Think really hard about what you said. Does a networked multi-core FEA tool running under Solidworks and solving non-trivial problems JUST run the CPU like hell for hours?

Does the operating system do nothing else while this is happening? Does the person using the workstation just sit there and watch it run or is he/she, perhaps, doing other work and running other applications?

While running an FEA tool is not THE test, it is one data point, good or bad. I can't remember the last time on of the Vista 64 machines crashed in the last, I don't know, four years or so.

I find it really hard to believe average crashes is 7.1/month on Windows 7. I run Windows 24/7. It's never crashed. I have an overclocked 4.5Ghz i5 and have many VMware sessions running. Maybe it's because I have quality hardware? Same experience with OS X. Both are rock solid.

It's not entirely clear whether that statistic is referring to operating system crashes (i.e. BSOD) or third-party application crashes, especially since it's listed together with the "most common crashing apps".

Edit - Nevermind, blue screens are listed in a separate section below. So I'm going to conclude that these are application-level crashes.

I'm not sure about this, but I don't think that these are kernel-level crashes - just plain old user-mode application crashes (ie not something that crashes the whole computer).

It's interesting that windows explorer under windows 8 is crashing that much. I guess there's a lot of new code in it.

It could also just be it being unresponsive and people click “close this application” instead of “wait until it responds again”, which I believe gets classified as an application crash by the system as well (but I'm not sure). In any case, such unresponsiveness can be caused by a non-available network connection already.

And that makes the crash ok? Applications shouldn't be non-responsive period, even if the network becomes unavailable they should at least fail gracefully.

Whenever I shutdown/restart Windows 8 for my monthly update (or whenever my machine gets too slow), most of my applications crash out (meaning, they can't shutdown in time for Windows to complain about it and ask you to crash the apps explicitly). This is with decent network.

The sample size is users of soluto, which appears to be a tool that analyzes your computer and makes automated 'tweaks' to make it faster and better. If it's like any similar program, that would explain the crashes.

Unless they offer more features than they used to, Soluto just watches your startup programs to determine which ones are slowing you down. They basically make recommendations on which programs to remove from startup. Not a bad service overall.

It's a very different web service now.

Personally, I have used Soluto to see what's going on during startup, and then removed it after. They do provide certain services like the ability to move programs to and from your startup more easily than through Windows Explorer if you keep it installed though.

It's the program crashes, not the OS ones. Bluescreens are in the next section.

Device Driver quality is usually the culprit. 90% of my OS X kernel panics are related to USB Hot Plug/Play (now that I think of - maybe one of the reasons why iPads don't have any type of USB Expansion)

They list which apps crash most - stuff like Google Drive, Adobe Creative Suite, iTunes. The only common one listed is Explorer in Windows 8, which could be due to a storage driver or something. So if you're not running the software they're listing, less likely that you'll see crashiness. I agree, I pretty much never see app crashes and haven't seen a BSOD since like Vista betas.

I've been happily using Windows 8 since the RTM months prior to the retail release and I mostly like it, but I've experienced a lot of Explorer crashes. These aren't a huge deal because the OS detects the crash and restarts another explorer automatically within seconds, but it is a bit annoying that it happens so often.

I haven't really looked into the issue much because it isn't a showstopper but I suspect the problem has to do with thumbnail generation because I mostly see it when navigating folders full of video clips used for video editing. It is possible/probable that explorer itself isn't what is crashing but rather some dependent codec used for the thumbnailing is crashing, but it would be nice if explorer isolated itself better from such crashes.

Windows Explorer is an userspace app, a driver would not force it to crash any more than it would force any other application using I/O to crash.

I have the same impression. Windows 7 is very solid. People still think that "windows is crashing", while the application is working incorrectly. Microsoft people do what they can (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html - The Two Forces at Microsoft part). I understand that "normal users" might not see the difference, but people who attempt to perform "statistical analysis" should do.

BTW without knowing what is "Based on Soluto community data" we can't really judge if their analysis has any sense.

I just read this entire article on the way to work and I have to say it's one of the best written and most informative pieces I've had the luck to come across on here.

Personally, I'm ill informed with most "software" languages and mostly use web languages and some c++ in my spare time projects, but this gave me quite in depth knowledge without getting overly technical.

I would definitely recommend a read to everyone scrolling past this comment.

I've been running Windows 8 over a year, the only time I had "crashes" when was my SSD was going out. Can hardly blame that on the OS.

Windows Server 2012 is a whole other story for me though.

I dont think its about blame. It is about how people experience the ecosystem as a whole. The average windows computer may consist of hardware and software from tens of different vendors, but for the end user something eiher works or it does not.

Interesting, but I suspect that the reduction in crashes may simply be due to the fact that a majority of windows 8 installations are either on new computers or are clean installs. I will be curious to see how the "crashes/user" number trends over time.

Another related factor is the difference in user demographics -- the early adopters may be more tech savvy.

I'd be more worried about what's crashing - Windows 8's Explorer is at the top, which is not a good thing...

This could come with the same concern. If a lot of these Windows 8 installs are new machines or clean installs there may not be as much third-party software installed so crashes that happen are more likely to occur in Windows components.

That said, the explorer crashes do worry me.

It's very sloppy, but not unusual for Microsoft, and easily fixed.

Could some of these be caused by 3rd party in-process shell extensions? Especially ones that aren't compatible with Windows 8?

The issue here is data relevancy. How high tech is this audience? How big are the numbers which they are using to pull this information together? You would hope its 6/7/8 figure numbers but as it isn't specified it could be based on a 1000 users which I feel is of limited value.

I recently upgraded to Windows8 and I was pleasantly surprised. I like it. It has some issues with consistency. ( Getting IE10 Metro to run requires IE to be your default browser which I don't like. / There are like 3 ways to shut down your PC / Navigation can be slightly awkward between metro app and desktop and back again. )

That said I feel it is a step forward and I hope to see more positive numbers like this in the future.

Hi, Roee from Soluto here, please see my full comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4793863

If this is representative then sales of win8 are great.

About 700m units of win7 sold to date. From this win8 is a bit more than 1/25th the sales of win7 So about 28m units sold so far?

That matches the numbers that Ballmer of about 1 million units per day [1] and keeps them on track for 400 million by EOY 2013 [2].

1: http://www.infoworld.com/t/microsoft-windows/steve-ballmer-f... 2: http://www.forbes.com/sites/benzingainsights/2012/09/07/how-...

Everybody can predict that 400 million number. http://phys.org/news/2012-11-china-lenovo-consumer-pcs.html claims

"The survey by IHS iSuppli said the total PC market in 2012 is expected to contract 1.2 percent to 348.7 million units, down from 352.8 million in 2011."

I think it is safe to bet that 90% of PCs sold in 2013 will be sold with Windows 8 installed. 90% of 350M gets you a good way towards that "400M copies sold" figure. Add in some sales for tablets and two months of sales in 2012, and you probably are there already. To get anything different, the economy would have to collapse spectactularly, or people would have to stop buying Windows PCs en masse.

For Windows, the more interesting figures would be how many PCs run Windows 8 (I bet many companies will overwrite Windows 8 with Windows 7 or XP), and how many standalone upgrades got sold.

Hi all, Roee from Soluto here (providers of the W8 data). I'll try to respond to the questions and comments here.

But first, a bit of background to the size and quality of our userbase. I warn you this is going to sound defensive, but it's important to establish that we're not a bunch of kids who sampled 50 Win8 VMs. So - Soluto's agent has been downloaded on over 3M machines in over 150 countries. We had one of the first applications running on the developer preview of Windows 8 over a year ago, and our first metro app was in the first batch released to the public in February together with the launch of the first consumer preview. We are a 2012 Microsoft Partners of the Year (in the startups category), we share investors with the likes of Skype, Dropbox & LinkedIn and most importantly - we're building a service that helps techie folks to provide tech support for their friends and family remotely without the need for remote desktop (free for supporting up to 5 PCs). Our hundreds of servers now deal with over 50 million data points every day, and we're big data junkies. Use Google to verify all that :)

And now a couple of points I hope will answer some of the questions-

1. The data used for the Windows 8 part is only based on RTM versions and later, i.e. it does not include developer preview or consumer preview.

2. Our users are outright techies, but on the other hand the machines we manage are a mix, since our users support their friends, parents and grandmas, leading to some really non-techie level usage types (IE6, 5 toolbars, etc). That being said, Windows 8 is more prominent on the supporter side in our userbase (i.e. we see more techies using it then non-techies).

3. The sample size for Windows 8 is still way smaller than that of Windows 7, naturally. But that page is automatically updating, so check it out once in a while, and with time the data will become more accurate, as big numbers tend to become. We still think it's valuable that way, even if not everything is perfectly significant. iTunes crashes more and Google Drive crashes less, that probably won't change without an update from these vendors.

4. To those who say there are no BSODs in the world since Win7 - I'm sorry but you are just plain wrong. I see the data on a daily basis. The situation is much better then XP and Vista, but part of the population still suffers from BSODs, mostly because of 3rd party drivers. I personally had a BSOD on W8 (the sad smiley modern BSOD, but still a BSOD).

5. I'm not the OP of this post and I don't know vinothshankaran.

6. As our page gets refreshed with data, we'll also be adding more components and clarifications.

If there's anything specific you'd like to see added to the page, by all means please share it here. As the lead product manager at Soluto and a long time HN enthusiast, crowdsourcing our requirements to this community sounds like a dream :)

And if you have specific questions or comments do feel free to contact me at roee@soluto.com

One last point- if you're the kind of person who receives phone calls for PC tech support from your friends and family members - give Soluto a try :)

Roee

Fantastic sample size. You should really mention it on linked page since a lot of people are skeptical about these sorts of surveys because of small sample sizes.

> we're building a service that helps techie folks to provide tech support for their friends and family remotely without the need for remote desktop

What is the thinking behind that? The appeal of remote desktops is that "show me" is orders of magnitude more efficient than "tell me". I would take the remote desktop every time.

The usual problem with remote desktops is they are a pain to setup. This is somewhat alleviated by Skype doing screen sharing, but sadly doesn't allow remote interaction.

Chrome's remote desktop has worked really for me, and does allow remote interaction. It does require Chrome to be installed on the supportee's system and one extension installed, but I haven't found that to be a problem. https://chrome.google.com/remotedesktop for anyone who is interested.

So do you have something in mind that is even more efficient than "show me" and remote desktops?

Interesting to see how vendor-provided files, drivers and utilities seems to be causing most problems across the line.

Also it seems that Windows 8 has a lot going for it stability-wise. The figures reported (if reliable) seems to indicate that Windows 8 is about 2-3 times more stable than Windows 7, which I already would consider pretty good. That's a remarkable improvement.

As for Windows 8 itself, I had a chance to fool around with it on a MS Surface tablet. Not saying I'm buying the tablet myself (I already have an Asus Transformer), but Windows 8 suddenly feels like it makes a lot more sense, once you are using it on a touch-enabled device.

Well it does until you fire up office, which appears to be glued on the side, badly.

I would be slightly hesitant to put the improvement in stability purely down to Windows 8. On average, the Windows 8 installs will be newer and fresher than the XP and W7 ones, and Windows has a bit of a reputation of detioriating with use.

Finally, early adopters are far more likely to buy highly specced machines, rather than cheaper machines that are not up to the job.

This is slightly inaccurate, for starters I don't know a single person with soluto nor have I ever heard of this before.

This is most likely geared towards a more tech savvy user, proving pretty much nothing as that is not the majority.

It started out as targeted towards very tech savvy users (i.e. most HN users, including me), but recently they added a feature where you can manage the computers of your friends and family through their web site, which I am doing for my parents and brother. Just yesterday I got an email saying my mom installed the "AOL Toolbar" Firefox extension. I asked her if this was intentional, she said no, and with 1 click, I disabled it. I'm not affiliated with it in any way, just a happy user (although 90% of the time, I don't think about it)

There are hundreds of windows 7 & 8 users around me, including myself. Haven't seen a bluescreen for a long long time.

Hi, Roee from Soluto here. When you deal with big numbers you see lots of BSODs, both in W7 and W8. The people surrounding you may be taking better care of their machines then the average. I personally encountered one BSOD on my shiny W8 machine.

What is the distribution of BSODs? Are they evenly spread over the population or are some users/machines responsible for the majority of cases?

We will improve the visibility of this, thanks.

"The people surrounding you may be taking better care of their machines then the average."

Selection bias works both ways, people who install such "utility" software may be taking worse care of their systems and installing more bloatware.

Just to clarify, the vast majority of our audience currently arrives through sites like LifeHacker, MakeUseOf and HowToGeek. "Bloatware" is uncalled for in this case, it usually refers to shit that's trying to make money of you without providing value. Please read my full comment that includes our bias analysis: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4793863

Will do! For the record, I was referring to the sort of user who installs "tuning" software in general, I was not referring to your product specifically. No insult was intended.

This is anecdote, but my Win8 crashed just this morning, when I unplugged my mouse from one and plugged it back into another USB port. It dumped memory to disk (with nice progress indicator :)), restarted and booted perfectly ok, just asked me if I want to send the data about the crash to Microsoft. It never happened before and I don't suspect it will happen again this or next year, either, but - it sure happens :)

As a similar anecdote, two days ago my Xorg server crashed. Not WM (E17) mind you, but X server. It was running continuously for about two months, was eating more and more RAM and finally, when Chromium froze and went on a RAM eating frenzy, the server crashed. It was the first time I saw X server crashing since I fought with enabling compositing in XFree on PIII 1Ghz, but still, it happened.

So, what I want to say is that no software can run flawlessly forever; it's just a question about how often (or how rarely) the crash (or other malfunction) is going to happen. 0.28 bluescreens per month per user is a pretty impressive feat and it's says more about how good than how bad W8 is.

Stats aside, that is a great looking and at the sametime readable site.

...uhm, is it just me or is this just a very successful way for them to promote their products via publishing more or less relevant statistics to have something under a link bait title? (dunno how much traffic this brought to their product site but I think this little scheme really worked for them :) )

Given that a good majority of the posts by startups here on Hacker News is aimed at attracting new customers, I see nothing wrong with this one. They analyzed their data and talked out the results. At no point did I feel pressured to learn more about their product, although out of curiosity I did checkout their main page.

No offence, but understanding the effect of Windows 8 based on a tool that speeds up boot times...is moronic considering Win8 has some of the fastest PC boot times I've ever seen on the PC market.

Edit: I know, it does more than that, but I've always known Soluto from when it was a startup analyzer.

Since you do know it does more than that (including monitoring system health and crashing applications – which it did for a long time, too) why do you still consider it moronic?

Just saying, a fresh install is a "healthy" install. I don't know anyone who gets a new PC and says "Boy, you know what this brand new machine needs? Some system maintenance software."

You never bought a computer with Windows already installed, did you? :)

Haha! I see your point!

Actually, my Dell came with minimal bloat.

My home PCs XP runs for years now. No crashes, no stuck "Apps", no demand for a change.

My laptops 7 is a constant crash, constantly overloaded, reinstalled several times but I have to work on it.

Did not even think about installing 8...

Maybe the problem lies with the laptop? I never have issues with 7, but my experience is just as anecdotal as yours. Have you tried XP on it to be sure?

Not XP (my private licence) but I have Ubuntu running parallel for my private stuff. Never had any problems with it.

Going to go on a hunch and suggest its a dodgy driver then, or some piece of hardware windows is picking up that Ubuntu isn't. Its annoying that bad drivers still crash windows but the same thing happens on Linux systems.

That would explain the crash but why is it so horrible slow?

I don't feel the speed difference between an Ubuntu/XP is as big as in between Ubuntu/win7 (talking about the old-desktop here).

Going to go with drivers again. The sad truth is closed source drivers can be as hit or miss as open source. By any measure I have tried, Windows 7 is considerably faster then XP for the gear I run, but only when proper drivers are installed (not the included Windows 7 ones).

It is annoying when you get something that's slower or doesn't work though. I was burnt by Creative with my Live! Drive and as such will never buy their hardware or software again, but I don't blame Microsoft.

One computer is anecdotal. I've got a house and a company full of Windows 7 laptops and workstations. (Three of which are on my desk.) Almost all crash related issues with this larger sample population have been with hardware and the very rare malware.

Windows 8 in the working population isn't a solution for the majority of productive users outside of the vertical markets that have a need for a tablet.

I never shut down my PC (Basically always use sleep/hibernate) and have it running for weeks at a time with the only issue being Firefox freezing up now and again.

I'd suggest the problem is with your laptop.

is the map half-user-localized ?

I get data for USA, Australia, China, Hungary and Romania, which seems like an example of "find the odd one" unless they detect my position somehow between HU and RO

Blown away by the stat about 7% of all Chinese PC users on Windows 8 already. Wonder how many are purchased as opposed to trial/beta versions though.

7 % of Chinese PC users who installed Soluto. I guess the large portion who uses a pirated, unpatched, malware-ridden XP probably doesn't have Soluto either.

I don't use Windows and I also don't use Google Drive but why on earth does it crash so often?

I honestly have no idea, but I can confirm it. I uninstalled Google Drive on my Windows 7 machine and never bothered to install it on my Windows 8 machine since it was basically unusable. It worked fine for several month and then one day it just started crashing within minutes of me logging in.

Google Drive does crash a lot, but Firefox crashes more (for me anyway).

Windows Explorer is still crashing?!?!

This is just an Ad to get people to use their service which monitors everything you do on your machine. Nope.

I'm confused, why is this relevant?

Where did they get this data? How do they get this data? How many people are they tracking? Who is Soluto? Their site doesn't make it clear at all. And I'm not going to watch a video to figure it out.

And clearly the only people using Soluto would be more tech-savvy users? Prove to me that this sample is representative of the entire population?

Scroll down on the home page. Talk about hidden below the fold...

// Edit: I wish they had more info. This looks like it could be REALLY slick for monitoring family computers health VS my current solution with LogMeIn.

For the things it can do, yes, it is very good. It's not a general-purpose login, so of course there will be things you can't do (like uninstall things). But the things you can do cover most things:

* Install/update programs via Ninite * Install Windows updates * Any screenshot they take with Soluto (F8) get automatically sent to you with system runtime information * Enable/disable/delay programs during startup (delaying them means Soluto starts them after you have a usable system) * Enable/disable web browser extensions * View hardware and driver information

>Where did they get this data? How do they get this data?

As is says on that very page: "Statistics are based on anonymous data collected from the Soluto community."

>Prove to me that this sample is representative of the entire population?

Where do they claim it is?

Hi, please the detailed comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4793863

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