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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

> If you have to reboot Windows for anything other than updates you should be looking into problems with your hardware and drivers. The "Windows is unstable" meme should really be dead and buried by now.

It it should be 'dead and buried' by now then why does it persist ?

It seems that there are enough people that share these experiences (not necessarily your own) to stop that from happening.

My own take is that it is getting better, but it isn't there yet.

One thing that I personally don't understand at all is why the industry did not long ago standardize on ECC RAM, the cost would have been marginal (due to the increase in volume) and the potential benefits in perceived stability would be huge.

Servers have it pretty much as a standard, any bit flipped in critical RAM can cause an OS crash (both for Linux and for Windows, RAM failures are OS agnostic).

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Maybe Microsoft's code doesn't cause crashes any more, but 3rd party drivers and shoddy OEM hardware are definitely still to blame. Users don't care why their stuff crashes, only that it does. And first hand, I see XP-era machines crash less after converting them to Ubuntu. I haven't tested a Vista machine, I've never seen anyone run one.

Re: ECC ram, my non-server, "consumer" linux boxes typically have uptimes of 100,200,300 days. They only go down for hard drive failures and OS upgrades.

My copies of XP and Vista were fairly peppy booters when first installed, but adding in assorted services (databases, Web server, VNC) slowed things down, plus I had to install antivirus software, which makes things even slower.

Of more concern to me is shutdown time, as in "eternity", and when I have to just hold the button button to force a machine off. Each time there is a real risk of corrupted drives (I'm recovering data right now from a drive corrupted because something hung Vista and I had to power off the box).

Each time it refuses to cleanly shutdown there is nothing displayed to tell me why.

Is there even an option to have windows show what it's doing when it shuts down instead of the often untruthful 'Windows is shutting down' message?

> I haven't tested a Vista machine, I've never seen anyone run one.

I'm a designer and programmer and was stuck on Vista for a little over 3 months after starting my current job. Photoshop required at minimum two reboots a day. Absolute hell.

At work, I have to restart my computer at least once a week. I'm not sure if it is Windows XP's fault or if it is another program I run. All I know is that after about a week the computer grinds to a halt, taking way too long to do anything reasonable.

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