Windows Vista stability

Vista SP2 vs. chronic low-grade Vista errors

Now that I’ve been living with Vista SP2 for three whole days, I’m getting some experience with the new environment on some production machines. I did encounter a situation where SP2 froze at 48% through its Phase 1 (of 3) changes prior to the restart between Phase 2 (before restart) and Phase 3 (post restart), but a reset on the machine caused it to start over with Phase 1, after which the entire remaining process completed successfully. Having made a complete backup before starting, and wondering if the admonition not to power off the PC while in process was as dire as stated, I was both surprised and pleased that the SP application proceeded and succeeded on a second try without having to restore the backup and start over. Is it possible MS has improved its SP application tools?

At any rate, with the SP now in place I’m watching my systems closely for stability and reliability. I’ve also dug into the System and Application logs in Event Viewer to see if some of my chronic and persistent errors have been addressed by the new service pack. Without conducting a complete exhaustive analysis, my observation is that some have been addressed, while some have not.

Here are some details. Prior to the SP2 application, I had a decent-sized laundry list of recurring errors for which I could find no fix, but which also didn’t seem to adversely affect system stability and usability. Here’s a summary table for these items:

Of these items, I see some have disappeared, and others have morphed slightly (and more informatively) into altered forms. The time service error remains unchanged (but it always works when I synch manually, so I’m not worried about it). The UFD error code persists, but also gets a new companion code 10111 that explicitly identifies the offending device by name. Because it always works when I plug it in, my workaround here is just to remove the device whenever I finish using it. 4374 (update not applicable) has gone away completely, and 15016 (Kerberos not initializing) shows up only once (it used to appear daily) . 4226 (TCP connect attempts) hasn’t showed up, either, but this usually occurs when I’m using FTP and I haven’t done so since applying SP2. That means I give SP2 a 20-40% improvement score on those “pre-existing conditions.”

As you might expect, however, I also see some new recurring items in the Event Viewer that I didn’t see before applying SP2. I summarize these in the next table:

The DCOM error is one I’ve seen before and relates to Windows Search attempts to index items that are no longer present (hence an empty search target in the error message detail), and ties of course into error 7000 as well. Likewise, Volume N relates to the UFD with the driver problems. All of these are items I can live with (and if I can figure out my search target issue for Windows Search) maybe even do away with.

My final analysis on SP2 for chronic errors: “So far, so good!”

My New Favorite Vista Epigram

I jsut read a marvelous story from the Sydney Morning Herald entitled “Windows 7 looking good, especially after Vista woes.” It includes a brief but telling remark about Windows Vista to which I can’t help but ascribe epigram status — namely, “Windows Vista is widely reviled, and sometimes seems so bad that it resembles malware (malicious software).” While I can’t agree with this statement, I can’t dispute its accuracy or relevancy, either. As you read through the story, and I encourage you to do at your earliest opportunity, you’ll find plenty of other interesting and diverting bits of techno-trivia.

What I’ve had ongoing trouble with right up to the present is with Vista’s complexity and lack of incisive controls. On certain hardware configurations, I’ve repeatedly found myself in situations where Vista would keep limping along, but an increasing number of applications would fade into the “Not Responding” state. At the same time, I found myself unable to bail out of the OS using either CTRL-ALT-ESC to get into Task Manager, or CTRL-ALT-DEL to call up the login/logout/control screen. Rebooting to re-establish system stability is kind of a cop-out anyway, but I’ll be darned if either the System or Application logs in Event Viewer can provide me with any data about what caused my system to hang, and required me to peform yet another “disruptive shutdown” to regain control over my machine.

In working with Windows 7, I’ve been able to get the two “attention sequences” (CTRL-ALT-DEL and CTRL-ALT-ESC) to work as they should even when the system got extremely flaky owing to installation of an obviously incompatible driver. I have to ask: why won’t Vista work the same way? I’m not ready to put this OS in the same class as malware, and I do believe I’ve reached an “uneasy rapprochement” with Vista, to the point where I can get along with it on a day-to-day basis and keep my own and my users’ machines up and running most of the time. But I keep wondering why it gets flaky from time to time, and how I might be better able to maintain stable, long-term operation (for more discussion see my March 12 Blog at ViztaView.com).

If anybody has any wisdom to dispense here, or any war stories or hard-earned experience to share, please chime in. Surely it’s better for us to suffer together, than to do so alone! Just because you think Windows Vista is out to get you, doesn’t mean you’re paranoid.