Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The State of Windows 8

soluto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 85 posts

Re: The State of Windows 8

#11

Post by SquareWheel »

blisse wrote: post #5

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?

>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?

Re: The State of Windows 8

#12

Post by natep »

dubcanada wrote: post #7

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)

Re: The State of Windows 8

#13

Post by account_taken »

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.

Re: The State of Windows 8

#14

Post by stevenwei »

account_taken wrote: post #13

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.

Re: The State of Windows 8

#15

Post by CountSessine »

account_taken wrote: post #13

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.

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.

Re: The State of Windows 8

#17

Post by mistermann »

cail wrote: post #10
jakeonthemove wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The State of Windows 8

#18

Post by notatoad »

account_taken wrote: post #13

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.

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.

Re: The State of Windows 8

#20

Post by bobsy »

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.

Post reply on HN