Reliability monitor from 12/3 thru 12/22

Here’s what I had to do to get myself into this situation of relative calm and proper operation:

• Troubleshoot the Dell AIO 968 printer’s default behavior to install itself as an XPS print device rather than as a native print device (this forces all print documents to be reformatted into an XML format, which the printer can output, but which also caused the Print Filter Pipeline Service, aka printfilterpiplineservice.exe, to crash regularly and repeatedly).
• Switch from Spyware Doctor with Antivirus to Norton Internet Security 2010 (to quell repeated daily crashes of the pctsSvc.exe notification tray program for the former program, after trying unsuccessfully to get the nice folks at PC Tools to help me solve the problem over a period of 30 days).
• Clean up my MS Office 2007 installation (which involved replacing an older PPT Viewer application with a newer version at Secunia PSI’s recommendation, then applying nearly a dozen Windows Update files that appeared in response to this change). This solved some repeated issues with Word and Outlook that had been entirely mysterious up to that point.
• Avoid installing toy or test progams on my production PC. As somebody who writes about software and utilities a lot, I’ve had to learn to resist the temptation to install them on a production PC, and to install them on a test machine instead — preferably within a VM so that they can’t mess up my test machine’s runtime environment, either.
• Groom the drivers on the production PC to make sure they’re all current, correct, and working well with Windows 7. For that purpose, I’ve used Phoenix Technologies’ DriverAgent Web site and my own ever-increasing understanding of how to fiddle with Windows device drivers. It usually takes me a month or so following a new OS install or system build to get everything working to my complete satisfaction.

To see what I was dealing with, here’s the Windows 7 Reliability Monitor’s graph from the day I installed Windows 7 RTM on my production PC (8/9/09) to today (12/22/09) where you can see my many and literal “ups and downs” in getting this system working properly:

Weekly reliability index readings for 8/9-12/22/09

I thought I had things licked the week of August 30, but found out the next week that I needed to alter the default configuration from installing the Dell AIO 968 printer drivers, then had to canoodle my way through the other issues mentioned in the preceding list until mid November. Everything else since then has been self-inflicted, and is part of my normal pattern of Windows system behavior: keep things running, make the occasional mistake or a change that alters stability for the worse, diagnose it, fix it, and keep on keeping on.

[Note: For the benefit of the sharp-eyed and incurably curious, the glitch that appears on 12/9/09 in the first screencap in this blog resulted from cancelling a hung Windows Explorer operation when I attempted to perform a search while the indexer was active. Rather than wait for the indexer conclude its operation and then complete the search I used Task Manager to shut the running instance down. This cost me a trivial 0.02 stability index points, but still shows up as an application failure glitch even though it makes no visible impact on the stability graph.]

Today, the stability index is less than great, but better than awful

Notice the absence of numerical values for the stability index anywhere on the display, and the categories for errors (red X), warnings (yellow exclamation point), and information (white “i” on a blue background) that the utility reports day by day. Note also the links at the bottom of the window.

As it happens, I jumped into a great blog by the inimitable Ed Bott at ZDNet this morning entitled “Windows 7 in the real world: 10 PCs under the microscope.” It’s a fascinating recitation of his experieces with 10 different PCs running Windows 7 over the past year or so. Throughout he cites specific stability index values from those machines, and I found myself asking “Where is he getting this data?”

That’s when I returned to the tool, and clicked the link at the lower left of its window (in case you can’t make out what it says, the link reads “Save reliability history…” I clicked the link, and saved the resulting data as an XML file, which I then opened in Internet Explorer. Bingo! As the following snippet illustrates, this is where you can find the actual numerical stability index value for any given day, captured at hourly intervals.

The graph data is right there in readable form

If you really want this data, you can go get it for yourself. But my question is: given that MS has to read this data to draw the graph in the first place, why can’t they add the few necessary lines of code to report the value in readable numeric form. They did it for the Vista version, but not for the Win7 version. I’m confused… and I hope they decide to fix this in an update or Service Pack some time soon.

That said, Bott also makes some great points about the value and meaning of the stability index in the aforementioned blog, on page 2. I’ll quote it verbatim:

And yet… My experience with this machine has been overwhelmingly positive. It runs nearly everything I throw at it and has no annoying bad habits. It doesn’t crash. It sleeps and wakes up reliably. The Reliability Monitor algorithm deducted huge amounts from the stability index (a total of more than 6 points) for two incidents that consumed 2-3 minutes each. In once case, an IE8 tab crashed four times in the space of a minute or two because of a problem with Adobe Flash in a single tab. Solution: Close that page. Two days later, I updated the excellent MediaMonkey music organizer/player to the most recent release, which proceeded to crash when I tried to run it. A quick trip to the support forums turned up the cause (an incompatibility with an iTunes 9 component) and the temporary fix (renaming a DLL). Although each event was annoying for a few minutes, neither one had even the slightest impact on performance after it had passed.

Lesson learned? If you’re happy with the way your system works, don’t obsess over a perfect 10.

On my production machine, I’ve had similar problems with several bits and pieces that have cost my stability index dearly. Until Dell came up with a bona fide Windows 7 driver for my AOL 968 combo device (print/scan/fax) I might see anywhere from three to ten “Printer Filter Pipeline Host stopped working” errors a day. Likewise, PC Doctor (the new beta version that supposedly works well with Win7) includes PC Tools Security Service item that crashed 7 times on 10/7/09, leading to the precipitous drop you’ll see in my stability index earlier in this blog. I’m happy to report that a switch to NIS 2010 took care of that problem, and that everything’s quiet with the AIO 968 since I upgraded the driver on 10/14. And now, I guess, I’m going to learn to live with a less-than-perfect stability index as long as my problems aren’t too serious or vexing.